TweakTown’s Solid State Drive Optimization Guide

There is no doubt that SSDs have gained a lot of market share with enthusiasts and even mainstream notebook users, and 2010 is going to be a big year for the technology.

As SSDs continue to gain popularity, the questions about how to properly set them up have become more frequent. To make matters worse, there have been so many sources of bad information published on the web. Even worse, a few companies have sold software that “Enables up to 50 times extra performance from your SSD”. When tested, the software actually slowed down disk performance.

Today we are going to cut through all of the hype and discuss proven methods that will allow you to get the most out of your high performance desktop or notebook. We have a lot to cover today, so let’s get started.

Read on…

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FreeBSD 8.0 Benchmarked Against Linux, OpenSolaris

With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side.

FreeBSD 8.0 introduced support for a TTY layer rewrite, network stack virtualization, improved support for the Sun ZFS file-system, the ULE kernel scheduler by default, a new USB stack, binary compatibility against Fedora 10, and improvements to its 64-bit kernel will allow a NVIDIA 64-bit FreeBSD driver by year’s end, among a plethora of other changes. With today’s benchmarking — compared to our initial Ubuntu 9.10 vs. FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks from September — we are using the official build of FreeBSD 8.0 without any debugging options and we are also delivering a greater number of test results in this article, along with a greater number of operating systems being compared.

Read on…

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Ubuntu Netbook Remix Optimization Guide

I recently got a new Eee PC and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 Karmic Koala (which is going to be renamed to Ubuntu Netbook Edition starting with Lucid) and even though UNR is already somewhat optimized, I don’t like how some things work and also there is room for a lot more optimizations. I would like to share with you these optimizations, all with screen real estate and low power consumption in mind. A part of this article is for EeePC only, but most work on any netbook!

Let’s get started (read on – huge post ahead)!

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Reducing HTTP Latency With SPDY

Google unveiled an experimental open source project in early November aimed at reducing web site load times. SPDY, as it is called, is a modification to HTTP designed to target specific, real-world latency issues without altering GET, POST, or any other request semantics, and without requiring changes to page content or network infrastructure.

It does this by implementing request prioritization, stream multiplexing, and header compression. Results from tests on a SPDY-enabled Chrome and a SPDY web server show a reduction in load times of up to 60%.

Read on…

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Optimizing Code for Speed

Optimization of code is the term that was applied to a process in which a code is tuned to be better in some respects: either speed, memory consumption, Input/Output (disk read and writes or network reads and writes), etc. In Mathematics, Optimization means a process in which one finds the values with the best performance. In Computing where programs are very complex, usually optimizing for speed in the mathematical sense is impossible. Instead the term has come to mean just advancing in the direction of better performance in one or more respects.

This document will focus on optimizing code to run faster. However, as you will see later, doing this may involve having to optimize the code in a different aspect. Furthermore, often when programmers are trying to optimize one aspect of a program, they are doing so in order to increase speed.

Read on…

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