Partitioning Puppy Linux for Max Speed?

Question

hey i have 2 old computers, each with less than 1 gig of ram.. i switched them from xp to puppy, and saw a nice speed boost (i can actually open things in less than 10 minutes) anyhow its still quite sluggish, and i think its the partitioning. I'm doing a Full Install dedicating the whole drive to Puppy linux, and a slave to storage.

for example i'll use the PC i'm on now

originally 15gig harddrive

i originally partitioned with a huge swap file(looked like so)

not sure exactly but this is close.

sda1 -ext4 file system -6gigs
sda2 -ext4 Boot -500 megs
sda3 -linux swap 7gigs

but after reading it said it was more efficient to swap in smaller partitions spread out between your drives

i added a new 30gig master, and switched old to slave

Sda1 Swap 128 megs
sda2 ext4-File system 26gigs
sda3 swap 128 megs
sda4 boot 500megs

sdb1 swap 128 megs
sdb2 ext4-storage-13 gigs
sdb3 swap 128 megs
sdb4 swap 128 megs

but here i seen a decrease in speed


I'm still new to partitioning, so what am i doing wrong, should i add more partitions, or what? use extended? any help would be appreciated, any tips for speeding up puppy are welcome too.

Answer 1

In theory partitions at the beginning will be quicker due to proximity to the heads, but in practice the only way there would be any noticeable speed difference is if you are using hard drives so old they can barely load files.



On all my installs I create a single extended partition for the entire drive, then a logical swap, followed by a logical ext4 for / and a logical ext4 for /home



I would suggest the sluggishness is a result of lack of ram (From the first to the second drive you go from 7 gigs of swap to 640 megs.



Run free -m to find out how much ram you are using and how much of it is in swap. Also, consider installing preload, a readahead deamon which will cache more useful libraries

Answer 2

I doubt that partitioning will help much with speed.

More real memory will probably help, depending on your task load.

If you look at the output of free, top, iostat etc maybe you can figure out what is taking the time - whether you are swapping, running 100% CPU, or waiting for IO.

If your tasks are disk IO bound, you might get some speedup from e.g. software RAID 5 with multiple disks.



Given the low price of disks, CPUs and motherboards it's probably easier to just upgrade. If you have the latest fastest PC and want it to go faster, then it makes sense to do all this tuning and hang out in the forums, maybe even get speed improvements written into the kernel. But for old components, no-one's interested.

Answer 3

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