This article reunites some practices I’ve been using for a while to improve performance on Arch Linux but will work for other distros too. Most of them related to (better) memory usage and caching.
So, here we go.
HDD vs SSD
It’s known that SSDs are much faster than HDDs. But they’re also much more expensive, so the best option is to have a hybrid disk and mount specific partitions on each one.
Mounting to SSD
My suggestion is to mount the core system to SSD while keeping /home and /var, which usually stores a large amount of data (media, databases, etc) on the HDD to use the larger available space.
This is my current /etc/fstab (UUIDs omitted):
# /dev/sda2 (SSD)
UUID=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 / ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 1
# /dev/sda1 (SSD)
UUID=0000-0000 /boot vfat rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro 0 2
# /dev/sdb1 (HDD)
UUID=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 none swap defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdb2 (HDD)
UUID=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 /var ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 2
# /dev/sdb3 (HDD)
UUID=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 /home ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 2
This simple setup will improve system startup a lot, as well as any application initialization while keeping large files on HDD. It will not, however, improve login time and some applications inits due to configuration files (~/.conf, mostly) being on the slow drive.
Caching to SSD
If you have a big SSD device (at least 64G) you may use it as a cache device for a slower disk.
There are two common options for that Bcache and Flashcache. You should decide of which one to use as they are not compatible and will both significantly increase disk IO. But there are caveats.
Bcache is quite easy to setup, but both disks (the backing device – HDD, and the caching device – SSD) must be erased before use. So it’s probably an option for new installations, only.
Flashcache, on the other hand, can work with already used disks, but has a much more complex installation and should only be tried by experienced users.
Personally, I didn’t test any (yet), since memory management has been good enough. See bellow.
Swapping to SSD
Swapping to SSD was pointed as a bad practice due to limited lifespan of SSDs in exchange of huge data writes necessary to swap. Modern SSDs, however, have random data writes that improves lifespan, so that may not be a problem anymore.
On the other hand, there are better options for Swap…
Swap or not Swap?
In early 2000 Swap was necessary, since memory was expensive and most computers rarely reach 1G. But we still hadn’t much data, mostly text and some images only, so it was ok to send some of it to disk. Moreover, peoples didn’t care too much about performance in that times.
Nowadays, most Linux installation instructions or wizards still asks for a Swap Partition. But here is a thing: Swap is probably what makes your computer slower.
So the solution is to swapoff everything? Well, you can do that, but there are even better options…
Decrease Swappiness
A simple improvement is to just ask the kernel to use less swap. This can be done by setting vm.swappiness to a lower value. The default is 60 (which is a lot). Any value between 10 ~ 40 will give you a better response, but if you have plenty of RAM, just set it to 1.
To check the current swappiness value:
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
To temporarily set the swappiness value:
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=1
To set the swappiness value permanently, edit a sysctl configuration file:
# /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf
vm.swappiness=1
Set Swap Devices Priority
If you have more than one swap device or file, you can define different priorities using the pri parameter on /etc/fastab or via the -p|--priority option of swapon.
For example, to set a higher priority on a SSD device:
# /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1 none swap defaults,pri=100 0 0
/dev/sdb2 none swap defaults,pri=10 0 0
Compress Memory with zram or zswap
zram (formerly compcache) and zswap are both kernel modules used to compress memory prior to disk swap. They both use more CPU in exchange to store more information on the RAM.
While zram creates a block device in memory that can be used as a swap device, zswap compress memory pages when they are to be swapped out and store them in a memory pool inside system RAM itself.
You surely don’t have to use both. I started to use zswap recently and it really reduces Swap usage allowing applications to have a faster access to available memory.
Instead of configuring it manually, you can just install the systemd-swap and configure it in /etc/systemd/swap.conf.
Install and enable the package.
pacman -Sy systemd-swap
sudo systemctl enable systemd-swap
sudo systemctl start systemd-swap
Set zswap_enabled=1 or zram_enabled=0 in /etc/systemd/swap.conf (don’t use both).
If you already have one or more swap devices, set swapd_auto_swapon=1 too. Otherwise, you may want to enable Swap File Universal or Swap File Chunked too, on the file.
Other configurations are good enough with default values, but feel free to tune up if you want.
Sync files to tmpfs
A good option to improve responsiveness is to sync most used directories to tmpfs. There are two daemons to automatically do that.
Profile Sync Daemon and Anything Sync Daemon both sync directories to a tmpfs using rsync.
The first sync browser profiles while the last can sync any directory you want.
Profile Sync Daemon
pacaur -Sy profile-sync-daemon
psd # run the first time to create ~/.config/psd/psd.conf
systemctl --user enable psd
systemctl --user start psd
You can edit ~/.config/psd/psd.conf to enable sync only to a specific browser, or just use default settings to sync all installed ones.
Anything Sync Daemon
Install the anything-sync-daemon package from AUR:
pacaur -Sy anything-sync-daemon
Then, configure /etc/asd.conf to define the directories you want to sync (Note: They must be directories, not files).
You may want to add USE_OVERLAYFS="yes" to reduce memory costs of sync operations.
sudo systemctl enable asd
sudo systemctl start asd
Process priority
Prioritize some applications IO and CPU scheduling is a good way to have better performance on what really matters. This can be done per command with nice and ionice commands, but hopefully, there is a daemon to make this task easier.
Ananicy defines a set of rules for several applications prioritization over nice levels. It even comes bundled with many community rules for common apps.
pacaur -Sy ananicy
sudo systemctl enable ananicy
sudo systemctl start ananicy
You may want to edit app rules under /etc/ananicy.d/, or just keep the defaults.
Conclusion
Most these settings comes from Arch Linux Wiki and it’s strongly recommended to read the entire pages over performance (see references bellow) before trying anything.
From my experience, the best improvements comes from having plenty of memory and use it the best way possible (tmpfs, swappiness, zswap, etc.).
Please, tell us of what improvements you’ve made on the comments section bellow.
References: