Speed up your Ubuntu machine with Preload
I recently downloaded and installed a program called Preload for my Ubuntu machine. From the Source Forge website:
“Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times”
I’ve been trying this software out for just a few hours and can tell a big difference in my system performance.
Installing and using this software is very easy. Simply open a terminal window, and type in the following:
sudo apt-get install preload
That’s it!
The program will automatically start and run after installation and begin monitoring your computer usage habits. The only weird thing about it is that the first time I restarted my computer, it logged off of X momentarily before logging back into my account for just a breif moment before finally restarting the computer for real. This was it’s way of learning what the system loads by default at login, so that the next time around will be faster.
My system hasn’t seen anything but performance increases since then, and I’d highly recomend you try it out. If you ever want to remove preload, you can do the following:
sudo apt-get remove preload
Though I am quite satisfied with the boost in performance it’s given me.
The author of preload has published a verbose (see boring) document that goes into a lot of detail about how the program works (involves a lot of crazy looking math problems). You can download it here. For the rest of us who like things simple, here’s a graph:
Enjoy your faster Linux box!