Mainstream performance

If you’re not yet willing to let go of your favourite desktop environment there are a couple of tricks you can employ to make them lose some flab.

You can start by turning off some of the fancy features that are taken for granted, such as the thumbnails preview in the file manager. If you open a folder with hundreds of files on a slow machine, the file manager will consume precious resources generating thumbnails. To turn off thumbnails on a Gnome-based machine, launch the Files file manager and head to Edit>Preferences. Switch to the Preview tab and set the value of Show thumbnails to Never. If you use KDE, go to System Settings and look for desktop effects and then turn them off. Similarly, the Nepomuk and Strigi features in the KDE desktop hog memory resources. You can disable Nepomuk and Strigi from System Settings from under the Desktop Search section.

One of the major causes of longer boot times is that your system starts unnecessary apps and services during startup. But before you axe them, it’s best to get a picture of what’s happening while your distro boots up.

Bootchart is a simple program that enables you to profile your Linux boot process and help measure the loading times of different services. It’s now merged with Systemd. Fire up a terminal and enter systemd-analyze time to reveal the breakdown of the boot process. Similarly, systemd-analyze blame will list all of the running units, ordered by the time they took to start.

To generate an image of the boot process, type systemd-analyze plot > boot.svg . From this image you can find all the active processes and can then remove the ones you don’t need. For example, if you print occasionally, you can disable CUPS from starting at the boot time. Furthermore, the image also helps you identify processes that take control of all resources and force the other processes to wait, effectively blocking the boot process.