Just some ideas i have of speeding up and removing unnecessary frills from slackware 10, KDE, to improve performance:

1. disable arts in kde
2. comment out ldconfig and fc-cache for bootstrap process.
3. Take away bsd-fortunes so fortune won't come up on every logon (? Will this help much?)
4. disable all KDE fancy stuff

Any other ideas apart from using light window manager? I want to keep KDE. I just want to slim down the system, speed up bootstrap or performance in general. I read about dietlibc and another libc, but that sounds rather extreme and may have compatibility problems.

THanks

Speeding up a system is a simple thing. Some of the things I do are:

Remove or disable all unnecessary crap. For me this includes KDE, Gnome, all system services I'm not using (FTP, SMTP, etc) and so forth
Compile everything with optimizations turned on (gcc -O2) <-- This may break some things

Basically, everything that you have running that doesn't *have* to be is a waste of memory. Your CPU can only be so fast, but the less memory you use, the less swap you'll use, and the faster the system will feel. Think of it like stripping weight off a race car -- turn off everything you can live without.

1) Disabling arts is probably a good idea. I dont use KDE so I can't give you any help here.
2) ldconfig is very important especially if you test out new software all the time
you can set ldconfig to run at shutdown, which would do just the same.
3) The BSD fortunes, I like , but i don think it would increase system performance.
if might increase log on time, but i think there is little to improve from the time you hit enter on your password, to the time you get your shell (default is bash).
4) The fancy stuff would of course be benificial.

-tank

ldconfig updates your shared libraries........you need this when installing other programs--
fc-cache updates the fonts library for the X-server...........
you really don't want to get rid of these!!

well...compiling all stuff yourself won't help, you''ll not notice the difference.
and if it's really so hard to wait 10 seconds at boot ( grab a cup of tea or so...),
then don't switch the thing off.

egag

Your not being able to tell the difference doesn't mean they won't be able to.

I think the original poster was looking for ways to speed up the system in general, not boot time. Why would anyone go to alot of trouble to speed up boot time? That's the thing a computer does least.

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I think the original poster was looking for ways to speed up the system in general, not boot time. Why would anyone go to alot of trouble to speed up boot time? That's the thing a computer does least.
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well... i'm sorry if i misunderstood , but the points 2 and 3 really suggest a quest for speedy booting.
( and in that time , i always grab a cup of tea...but that's just an example. )
and if anyone has really good reasons to compile it all ( and there are...), not one of those reasons will be speed.
you can't win much speed there , but it's just an opinion. don't feel offended.
anyone is free to try but don't expect miracles.

egag

No offence taken

There's only so much you can do to make a 400MHz with 128MB running KDE3 "fast" (Not suggesting the poster has that configuration, just making a point). I was just trying to help.

I would recommend running only from console and forgetting all that eye candy desktop stuff. Your system will be quick and you will learn more about linux than you ever thought possible. No drag and drop, double click stuff.

That might be a bit extreme. I work in consoles to machines in various places around the world all day long, and while you can get your work done, 80x25 kind of sucks for browsing the web -- even with elinks or w3c -- though I do read my email in a terminal

X is for lots of terminals and a browser. I recommend evilwm or ratpoison. Nothing pretty to distract you. (black|open|flux)box if you just have to have buttons to click on

Is there away to watch video without kicking up xwindow?

I understand that mplayer can use framebuffer to watch video in console.

Yes, enable framebuffer support and man mplayer for more details, its detailed and probably one of the best man pages out there.

2. comment out ldconfig and fc-cache for bootstrap process.

This will do nothing to help performance except that its only run at bootime. Removing these will only help speed up the boot process time.
I personally remove these to speed up my own boot of my system, but its best to remember to run these after installing fonts or applications.. or just setup a cronjob to run everynight, etc.

3. Take away bsd-fortunes so fortune won't come up on every logon (? Will this help much?)

Its only loaded that one time at bootup, so removing it won't help your performance as it will only take up the 1/10 of a second to display at login.

You could always use a framebuffer console. I've seen 132x50 text - certainly that's better than 80x25.

But either way, using Fluxbox or something would probably be easier to manage.

Fluxbox? Bah, use BadWM when I need resources free. I use 13% of my RAM on boot and I have 256mb - that's with a desktop background and a few different services running.