Mailing List Archive: Gentoo: Performance

Speeding up program starts with squashfs

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mereandor at gmail

May 9, 2007, 12:10 PM

Post #1 of 7 (1610 views)
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Speeding up program starts with squashfs

deer, list!

I currently try to minimize the application startup-time for my gentoo-laptop.
Even with prelink it takes about one minute to start kde and all programs in
autostart due to the heavy disk i/o load.
In the last days I did some tests with taking a copy of my regular /usr (ext3)
dir and storing it in a squashfs file. I then mount it as loopback device
on /usr. (Leaving the original copy still intact but hidden.)

Those are the effects I try to achieve:
1. The filesystem has no fragmentation at all. Files in my regular /usr dir
are somewhat fragmented, but not too badly.
2. It's compressed: less disk i/o and more cpu load.

So far the results have been promising. With the new squashfs I'm down to
around 50 secs (-16%). But at the moment my benchmark methods are quite
primitve. I simply have a stopwatch nearby and meassure the time from login
to when the disk is idle again. I'm looking forward to some input on this.

greets
Roman

tracyde at gmail

May 9, 2007, 12:28 PM

Post #2 of 7 (1538 views)
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Re: Speeding up program starts with squashfs [In reply to]

You may want to look into using ReadAhead, some of the newer init systems
are using it to decrease boot time.

On 5/9/07, Roman Zimmermann <mereandor [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> deer, list!
>
> I currently try to minimize the application startup-time for my
> gentoo-laptop.
> Even with prelink it takes about one minute to start kde and all programs
> in
> autostart due to the heavy disk i/o load.
> In the last days I did some tests with taking a copy of my regular /usr
> (ext3)
> dir and storing it in a squashfs file. I then mount it as loopback device
> on /usr. (Leaving the original copy still intact but hidden.)
>
> Those are the effects I try to achieve:
> 1. The filesystem has no fragmentation at all. Files in my regular /usr
> dir
> are somewhat fragmented, but not too badly.
> 2. It's compressed: less disk i/o and more cpu load.
>
> So far the results have been promising. With the new squashfs I'm down to
> around 50 secs (-16%). But at the moment my benchmark methods are quite
> primitve. I simply have a stopwatch nearby and meassure the time from
> login
> to when the disk is idle again. I'm looking forward to some input on this.
>
> greets
> Roman
>
>

--
---------------------------------
Derek Tracy
tracyde [at] gmail
---------------------------------

mereandor at gmail

May 9, 2007, 12:36 PM

Post #3 of 7 (1535 views)
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Re: Speeding up program starts with squashfs [In reply to]

Am Mittwoch 09 Mai 2007 21:28 schrieb Derek Tracy:
> You may want to look into using ReadAhead, some of the newer init systems
> are using it to decrease boot time.

Sorry, I think you missunderstood something: I already using readahead and
it's not boot time I'm interested in. This is currently the smaller amount of
time.
I'm interested in program start times _after_ the system is booted.

Thanks for answering though.

Roman

tracyde at gmail

May 9, 2007, 12:46 PM

Post #4 of 7 (1537 views)
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Re: Speeding up program starts with squashfs [In reply to]

On 5/9/07, Roman Zimmermann <mereandor [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> Am Mittwoch 09 Mai 2007 21:28 schrieb Derek Tracy:
> > You may want to look into using ReadAhead, some of the newer init
> systems
> > are using it to decrease boot time.
>
> Sorry, I think you missunderstood something: I already using readahead and
> it's not boot time I'm interested in. This is currently the smaller amount
> of
> time.
> I'm interested in program start times _after_ the system is booted.
>
> Thanks for answering though.
>
> Roman
>
>
Right but isn't it possible to utilize readahead to "pre-load" a ramdisk,
that way the io is happening before X is even ready to come up.

--
---------------------------------
Derek Tracy
tracyde [at] gmail
---------------------------------

lnxg33k at gmail

May 9, 2007, 12:52 PM

Post #5 of 7 (1537 views)
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Re: Speeding up program starts with squashfs [In reply to]

I can't speak about squashfs. However, as Derek Tracy eluded to, you can do
other things to improve performance such as running a different init system. I
remembering trying init-ng a while back and it ran fine, but I didn't want to
take the time to mess with it too much and reverted back to sysVinit. There is
a wiki on different init systems [1].

You may also want to check the forums for discussions on bootchart. This is a
boot time monitor that generates graphs of load times. I've never run it, but
people seem to get a lot of success from it. Hopefully that's some useful place
to start even if it's not related to squashfs.

[1] http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Speed_up_your_boot_time
--
gentoo-performance [at] gentoo mailing list

tracyde at gmail

May 9, 2007, 1:31 PM

Post #6 of 7 (1539 views)
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Re: Speeding up program starts with squashfs [In reply to]

On 5/9/07, lnxg33k <lnxg33k [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> I can't speak about squashfs. However, as Derek Tracy eluded to, you can
> do
> other things to improve performance such as running a different init
> system. I
> remembering trying init-ng a while back and it ran fine, but I didn't want
> to
> take the time to mess with it too much and reverted back to sysVinit.
> There is
> a wiki on different init systems [1].
>
> You may also want to check the forums for discussions on bootchart. This
> is a
> boot time monitor that generates graphs of load times. I've never run it,
> but
> people seem to get a lot of success from it. Hopefully that's some useful
> place
> to start even if it's not related to squashfs.
>
> [1] http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Speed_up_your_boot_time
> --
> gentoo-performance [at] gentoo mailing list
>
>
lnxg33k

Roman isn't looking to speed up his boot, he is looking to speed up
application startup times after boot. I was eluding to the possibility to
use Readahead to pre-load a ramdisk immediately after the OS boots. I
didn't want to throw his e-mail off topic.

--
---------------------------------
Derek Tracy
tracyde [at] gmail
---------------------------------

mereandor at gmail

May 9, 2007, 2:07 PM

Post #7 of 7 (1535 views)
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Re: Speeding up program starts with squashfs [In reply to]

Am Mittwoch 09 Mai 2007 21:46 schrieb Derek Tracy:
> Right but isn't it possible to utilize readahead to "pre-load" a ramdisk,
> that way the io is happening before X is even ready to come up.

That sounds more interesting now. I think I did mean something else with
readahead at first. So if I really want to speed up things (more) there is no
way around replacing sysvinit? (Still sounds a bit scary to me ...)

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