[ralphy]

Proposing a new Lite Tweak (Preload Apps - Fetches commonly used apps into memory for faster startup times)

Install Preload

Code:

sudo apt-get install preload

Projects home
https://sourceforge.net/projects/preload/

Preload is a daemon (a background service) – that monitors the applications you use on your computer. It learns the libraries and binaries you use and loads them into memory ahead of time so the applications start faster. For example, if you always open LibreOffice and Firefox after starting your computer, preload will automatically load each application’s files into memory when your computer starts. When you log in and launch the applications, they’re start faster.

Detailed explanation can be added to Linux Lite Documentation perhaps... also recommendations as of whether to use it or not as well as its real functionality.

After installing it... make sure it is running:

Code:

systemctl status preload

Once running, launch a couple apps few times (something heavy like Firefox or Gimp) reboot your machine and test launching those apps again. The startup times of those apps will be undoubtably faster.

[valtam]

Sounds good Ralphy, go for it.

[ralphy]

I think I have a good version for you to test already... giving it some final touches :)

[ralphy]

Committed to master! Let me know your thoughts.

[valtam]

Works a treat Ralphy, nice addition to Lite Tweaks. Thank you :)

[valtam]

Slight rewording change added.

[ralphy]

You are most welcome.

I was thinking that we could also add "Disable and Enable" SWAP as an additional tweak. I coded some basic stuff and it worked well but additional checks may be needed for this one if ever implemented. For example, if we were to implement that too (which is mostly used by advanced users) we need to prevent users with less experience from disabling the SWAP in systems where there is no enough RAM. And that's how I got myself thinking about not going into disabling swap but instead implement something like vm.swappiness (it is safer for everyone while also effective)

The Linux kernel provides a tweakable setting that controls how often the swap file is used, called swappiness. A swappiness setting of zero means that the disk will be avoided unless absolutely necessary (machine run out of memory), while a swappiness setting of 100 means that programs will be swapped to disk almost instantly. Ubuntu systems comes with a default of 60, meaning that the swap file will be used fairly often if the memory usage is around half of the RAM. You can check your own system's swappiness value by running:

Code:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

60 is default in Ubuntu (kinda high)

Tweaking the swappiness will keep us away from giving uneducated users the option to disable swap completely (which can be detrimental to the system or even cause it to crash) but gives us the option of making Lite even more responsive by dictating to the OS when to swap... With a value turn down to 10 or 15, the swap file will then only be used when RAM usage is around 80 or 90 percent. Considering a low end PC with 1GB RAM only, the system won't start swapping until there is just about 100MB RAM free.

To change the system swappiness value permanently, open /etc/sysctl.conf as root and add: vm.swappiness=10, then reboot. Or to just change it while the system is running: sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10 (will not remain after reboot).

[valtam]

Swapiness is something I've used before and would be a welcome addition to Lite Tweaks, providing there was a clear, concise dialogue box in plain english that accompanied it (again, remember Grandma :) )

[ralphy]

Let's come back to this at a later time. I'll leave it there for now.

[valtam]

No problem, thank you for the suggestion.