I use these setting on a laptop with a Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. It might seem like overkill to tweak this system. However since it is a work machine at any time I am running Lotus Notes, VirtualBox, OpenOffice, Chrome, etc. Should you have a system with limited resources I would recommend Xubuntu for a light full-featured DE. Another option and very light on resources would be any of the open|flux|blackbox window managers.

Looking to get a bit more performance from your Ubuntu desktop (laptop)? Here are a few tweaks I currently use.

Swappiness:

We all know what a bottleneck swap can be. This setting will force your system to keep more data in cache. The applications/data in cache will feel be more responsive as they are not unloaded to disk/swap. Experiment and find what works best for you.

The Swap file is controlled by a variable called “swappiness” and higher the number, the greater the tendency to go to the disk.

  • swappiness can have a value of between 0 and 100
  • swappiness=0 tells the kernel to avoid swapping processes out of physical memory for as long as possible
  • swappiness=100 tells the kernel to aggressively swap processes out of physical memory and move them to swap cache

Identify your current system swappiness and vfs_cache_pressue settings by using the commands below.

swappiness

$ sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

cache_pressure

$ sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure

Ubuntu’s default swappiness value is 60, vfs_cache_pressure value is 100.

Now change your swappiness to 10 and cache_pressure to 50.

$ sudo sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10
$ sudo sysctl -w vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

The changes above using sysctl are for testing, they will be reset on reboot. When you are comfortable making the settings persistent they will need to be added to the /etc/sysctl.conf file.

$ sudo vim /etc/sysctl.conf

Add the following to the end of the file.

# swap/ram tweaks
vm.swappiness=10
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

Additional reading: Ubuntu Community Documentation: SwapFaq.

CPU Scaling:

$CPU_THRESHOLD setting is the point that your system will increase/decrease the processor frequency. In the example below we will set this value to 40. When your CPU sampled load rate exceeds 40% the CPU frequency will scale. Adjust as needed.

To change the CPU threshold you will need to add the following command into your /etc/init.d/ondemand script.

for CPU_THRESHOLD in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold
do
  [ -f $CPU_THRESHOLD ] || continue
  echo -n 40 > $CPU_THRESHOLD
done

Open /etc/init.d/ondemand and add the code above into the $CPUFREQ for loop.

$ sudo vim /etc/init.d/ondemand

It should looks like this when added.

for CPUFREQ in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
do
  [ -f $CPUFREQ ] || continue
  echo -n ondemand > $CPUFREQ
  for CPU_THRESHOLD in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold
  do
    [ -f $CPU_THRESHOLD ] || continue
    echo -n 40 > $CPU_THRESHOLD
  done
done

Some people recommend changing the $CPUFREQ from ondemand to performance. Doing so will set your processor to full speed. This option is not recommended for a laptop as it will drain your battery and might cause heat issues. For a standard desktop it might be worth testing out.

apt-fast:

This script reminds me of powerpill for Archlinux. Powerpill is a wrapper for Arch’s package management tool pacman. As you might have guessed apt-fast is a wrapper for apt-get. Apt-fast uses Alex download accelerator as opposed to apt/aptitude’s use of wget. Axel is available in the standard repositories and is required for the script to function.

Download apt-fast here

Save the script and make it executable.

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/apt-fast

Use the script as you would apt.

Download atp-fast from http://www.mattparnell.com/linux/apt-fast

/etc/hosts:

There was a bug in the previous version of Gnome that caused a performance problem when the hostname was missing from the /etc/hosts file. It is easy enough to address and will not cause any issues.

Edit /etc/hosts and add your hostname to the loopback address. Replace myserver.mydomain.com myserver with your actual hostname.

127.0.0.1 myserver.mydomain.com myserver localhost

Note: These settings are not recommend for use on server systems. {: .flash .flash-warn}