For personal reasons I love tuning the performance of my operating systems. My personal choice is, usually, Debian GNU/Linux. I always part from installing a base system from a netinstall image and then I uninstall some packages that I won’t need. Lastly I change a few things to optmize performance and have a lighter gnu/linux operating system:
- Don’t install any display manager (kdm, gdm, xdm, ldm…)
- Install a windows manager instead a desktop environment (my personal prefference now is awesomewm)
Reduce swap consumption or disable swap
We can edit the swappiness file that controls the trend kernel to swapping (default is 60) (This is my choice for systems where I have swap partitions: desktop, laptops…)1
# echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
We can disable the swapping with swapoff
1
# swapoff -a
Disable unused services
If we are using systemd we can disable services on boot by running:1
# systemctl disable service-name
We also can use the text-based console tool sysv-rc-conf to disable (or enable) services for each runlevel (remember that debian does not make any difference between runlevels 2-5).
Enjoy! ;)