Speed-Up from old archive thread

[Member PDP-8]

Right – with some serious couch-time at home due to this tragically global crisis, I was reading through some of the old antiX forum archives and ran across this golden nugget to speed up your system. I’m running relatively new hardware only a year or so old (but with 6 year old cpu’s and video) and this certainly made a difference:

In /etc/sysctl.conf

Try changing your
vm.swappiness=X

variable. Mine was set to 10 as default. So I changed it to 1

vm.swappiness=1

and left the rest as is. WOW. Oh SNAP. Not imaginary, but seemingly so fast on my hardware that stuff just pops up, be it on antiX 19, or the “core” version with nothing but cli programs.

I guess it all depends on hardware. At home I’m running mostly small “fanless” mini-pc’s with older low power AMD cpu’s (VNOPN K1 models), albeit the infrastructure (bios / uefi, usb 3 ports yadda yadda) this tweak to swappiness made a big difference.

I’ll let you know if I have any problems, but so far, so good. Also, rummaging through the archives got me some nice metallic Samsung usb-sticks that seem really nice to take away some heat – thanks to Bitjams recomendation – I may want some more to feed my persistence addiction…

[Member PDP-8]

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Test with MX 19.1 :

Interesting – with the very same hardware and usb sticks used for persistence, merely applying the lines from antiX 19.1 from sysctl.conf didn’t result in any major speedup – at least from a visual standpoint. I didn’t time it.

Then again – I’m patient. My first exposure to Unix was a Tandy Model 6000HD when I was working as a gopher in a lawyer’s office. Unfortunately, I only had a color-computer budget, but boy did I lust after this Xenix box.

So for MX, I just removed those lines I added from the antiX speedup since it didn’t seem to affect operations much.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by PDP-8. Reason: clarity

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