Hi guys, I've got a question.
I am installing Gentoo. Could you please recommend me a proper i/o scheduler for a very old notebook? Pentium 2 266MHz, 64MB of memory and some slow, 3,25GB HDD. I'm not sure if CFQ wouldn't be too "heavy" for this hardware. On the other hand, won't no-op and deadline make i/o operations slower, as it is HDD? Does anybody have some suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

I've rarely bothered with the scheduler - and when I did, I had a hard time proving it made any difference. However on one particularly sluggish laptop I upped the writeback delay from 5 to 15 seconds with positive effect. Just echo "500" to set it back - or reboot.

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Thank you for the advice. I'll check it.

Another thing I just thought of.
Turn off any indexing software (desktop search) that may be running - on gnome it's tracker, kde has similar. Not sure about the lighter DE's - one of which I guess you'll be using.
Even though they purport to run at low I/O priority in the background, I found tracker caused significant slowdown on (all) disk I/O - also caused cache purging. I turn it off on my normal systems nowadays.
And if it was me I'd make sure I used a light browser - I did some kernel tracing of disk i/O (same sluggish laptop), and both Firefox and Chrome hammer ~/.cache on disk. At one point I even moved .cache to a tmpfs to stop the physical I/O.

somehow i doubt this machine is running a gui at all, let alone a DE :lol:

Yeah, you're no doubt correct.
Makes you wonder why gentoo at all - I don't reckon you'd want to be compiling anything on that. I gave up on it (gentoo) years ago for Arch.

@syg00 I don't use any indexing software, I am aware it's unnecessary on such hardware. Also, on gentoo I have like ~7MB of RAM used w/o X and ~24MB with Openbox run. I doubt it'd be possible using Arch. I compiled most of the system on my main computer, then copied it to this one and configured :P.

@ondogo: Actually... :P It works quite good with Openbox + fbpanel.

i'm impressed!

I'm impressed too, I was sure I'd be able to use some ncurses-based applications w/o X at most.