Multi-tasking in openSUSE

This post is testimony to my satisfaction with openSUSE 11.1. On my Compaq Presario v6409, I am freely multi-tasking wihtout bothering for system crash or hangs.

On the same system, with a Windows OS, I would not try music, Firefox with multiple tabs, Thunderbird, two open pdf files simultaneously ever; but with openSUSE I can do even more and it runs smooth. Actually, here I have got a couple of KWrite sessions, an emacs session and a chat sessions on as well. Moreover, if it were Vista, it would be crawling halfway through the trial. By the way, I also edited the blog images in Gimp with all these open.

Qtcurve updated

I updated qtcurve-gtk2 to version 0.62.5-8.1 on my opensuse 11.1 and the results were apparent in my Thunderbird buttons.

Fine tuning boot on openSUSE 11.1

Recently, I have been trying to fine tune my bootup process. I installed sreadahead from openSUSE build service. I also installed mkinitrd, aaa_base, bootchart, udev, and sysvinit from the devel:playground:fastboot repository. Here is the result.

The disk usage is more frequent but bootup time increased. Also I found that while shutdown the drives could not be umounted properly and my system time was configured to UTC instead of IST.

Next I installed module-init-tools, libvolumeid1, sysconfig, glib2, glib2-devel from that repo and tested. Here are the results.

The disk utilization has improved. Another observation was uniformity in CPU utilization. Earlier it used to be heavy at some periods, and nearly no CPU utilization rest of the time.

Next I have tried installing gconf2, gconf2-devel, gvfs, gvfs-backends, gvfs-fuse, kbd, libbonobo, libbonobo-devel, libgio, libgio-fam, libglib, libgmodule, libgobject, libgthread, libgvfscommon and xorg-x11-driver-video.

Bootchart on opensuse 11.1

After my trials on my Gentoo system, I wanted to chart out the bootup of my opensuse system.

Opensuse has parallel boot by default. It is interesting to see that out of the box, without any tweaking it is one of the fastest booting systems.

Improving on bootchart

From the the bootcharts I posted in my previous post, it is obvious that sleep times could be eliminated to bet better boot up performance. So I thought of looking at boot messages to find processes that I could do away with or at least do something about. During boot-up, the boot process was looking for ethernet connection, i.e. it was trying to bring up net.eth0. As internet wasn't always connected, it was waiting longer when started with no connection. So I created an offline runlevel and added a new entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst. The procedure is described well in the Gentoo handbook. Here is what I got: a reduction of about 30 seconds in boot-up time.

Bootchart on Gentoo

Recently I tried to chart out my system's boot-up. I got bootchart on my new Gentoo. Then I added a line to my menu.lst as described at the bootchart site and rebooted to test my boot-up. Here is what I got.

I read little more about it and found that I can turn on RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP in /etc/conf.d/rc to get slight improvement in speed. I read that in the comments of the rc file. It was also suggested that I should turn on RC_VERBOSE. So I did it. I got a five seconds increase.

Here is the output of uname -a (I have cut out unnecessary parts like system time)
Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r8 #1 SMP i686
Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz

Here is the bootchart with a scheduled filesystem check.