Hello collegues;

I have recently resized my Ubuntu partitions using Gparted to give them more space in the hard disk. Everything has gone OK and Ubuntu runs fine. I know that Linux does not have the Windows file systems'problems (defragmentation and so on), but Is there any trick or action to tune up the hard disk and optimize its speed?

Thank you very much in advance for oyur attention,

Regards,

there are different ways to speed up different files systems based on how you use them, soooo...

Do you want to optimize for large files or small files (small files would be, say, 5-50MB or less)?

What file system are you using (i.e. ext3, reiser, xfs)?

Hello, thank you por your replay,

I am using Ext3 filesystem. I would like to optimize the performance globally, but if this is not possible I think small files would be my choice.

Regards,

I'm sorry that this isn't more timely, but...

If it is an IDE/PATA drive (probably isn't, if its recent; SATA is more likely), you can check that DMA is on. For IDE drives, using the highest supported mode should increase the performance fairly reliably, so the only concern with this tweak is what IDE modes are supported. You may see something about this in 'dmesg', otherwise use hdparm to investigate.

For volumes for which the majority of files are small (...actually, its the majority of file accesses that is the issue, rather than the majority of files...) Reiser should be faster than Ext3. Reiser has special ways of dealing with small files (...providing that you don't turn it off [ie, activate notail]...) which do increase the speed. Its a closer comparison for Reiser and an EXT4 system correctlt tuned, but EXT4 is probably still a bit experimental for my taste. Reiser 4 is probably a bit further out still than Ext4, but is probably noticeably faster than Reiser 3 in some operations.

Note also that tuning of an Ext4 filesystem probably makes more difference than earlier filesystems; if you get it wrong, you can probably make an Ext4 fs slow down more than an Ext3 one would, in percentage terms. even sub-optim,ally tuned, it should probably still be at least as fast as EXT3 though.

(Note that these comments of FS speed are, in effect, averages; for all file systems there is something that they do (relatively) well and something that they do relatively badly. In extremis, your mileage will vary.)

Probably more useful for you than consideration of which file system might have been better for you to choose at install time, but which it is no longer the optimal time for you to choose is to turn off 'atime' for particular volumes.

'atime' is access time; if you turn it off, you will no longer know when a file was last accessed (but you will still know mtime - the modification time - which is usually more interesting). In some workloads, this will make an appreciable difference, in others it will only be an indistiguishably small difference, but I don't think there are any circumstances in which this slows things down. Obviously, if you think you will need access time for, eg, forensics, you shouldn't do this, but most people won't want this.

Ubuntu currently uses the relatime option in fstab for this purpose. This article suggests that changing "relatime" to "noatime" will improve performance:
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/set-up-...e-and-noatime/