[Cialug] Linux Tweaks and Hacks

[James Shoemaker]

Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> Anybody care to share their favorite performance tweaks for Linux?
> 
> When I install a redhat-based system I like to use the reiserfs file system.
> I feel like it gives better performance but I don't have any quantitative
> evidence.
> 
> At the installation prompt I enter 'linux enable reiserfs' and then during
> the graphical partition set-up I edit the individual partitions and switch
> them to reiserfs.

	Have they fixed the performance problems with Reiser yet?  I used to 
use reiser, but had problems with it dropping frames when capturing from 
my DV camera.  I switched to Ext3 and all my problems went away.  Reiser 
seemed to be a little too agressive with caching and it spent too much 
time in kernel mode and missed interrupts when it flushed its cache. 
The system worked fine until the cache filled up, then the machine would 
freeze while the cache was flushed to disk.
	It was described on the mailing lists as large writes starving reads, 
but in actuality they starved EVERYTHING.
	With Ext3 on the same machine I could capture from my camera, and 
encode MPEG so it wasn't a performance problem, but an architecture 
issue.  The machine was a Duron 1Ghz with Wide Fast SCSI drives.

James