Four Ways to Speed Up Ubuntu

Mostly the Windows users look for posts like this that helps in improving the performance of the operating system. Windows is known to get “tired” couple of months (days as well, in some cases) after the installation. Linux users, on the other hand, hardly cares about improving the computer speed (read performance). Ubuntu is the most widely used Linux distribution across the globe, fast, sleek, stylish and powerful. But just because it is fast does not mean that it cannot be made faster. In this post we will see some tips that can help you to speed up Ubuntu.

1. Reduce application start up time with Preload:

Preload is a daemon that runs in background and analyzes the user behavior and tracks what applications are being used frequently. Based on these analysis, it predicts what application the user might run next and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory and thus increases the startup time of the application.

Install Preload in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) using the following command:

sudo apt-get install preload

At next boot, it will start running automatically. There are no known side effects of Preload, so you can use it without any hesitation.

2. Clean unused temp and log files with BleachBit:

BleachBit is the Linux counterpart of the famed PC optimization and cleaning tool CCleaner. It frees disk space by freeing cache, deleting cookies, removing Internet history, shredding temporary files, deleting logs and removing many such things you never knew about. It also has advance feature that completely removes the files to prevent recovery.

Install BleachBit using in following manner:

sudo apt-get install bleachbit

3. Improve speed with zRam:

zRam is a tool that mimics the swap disk by creating a block in memory which functions as swap space. Since this “virtual swap” is created in RAM, it is much faster than the actual swap disk. If you have poor system configuration with low RAM, ZRAM will work really well. A must have tool for systems with less than 2 GB RAM.

You can install it from the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shnatsel/zram
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zramswap-enabler

Or you can simple download the .deb file from here.

4. Speed up boot time by decreasing Grub timeout:

By default, the Grub timeout is set to 10 seconds. Which means that you have to either wait for 10 seconds or press Enter. You can reduce this timeout to, say 2 seconds. This gives you enough time to boot in to Windows (in case of dual boot) or go to Recovery. To change the Grub time out use the following command in terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

In this configuration file look for the line:GRUB_TIMEOUT=10. Change the value 10 to any number you want. This signifies the timeout in seconds. Save the file. Run the following command to update the grub file:

sudo update-grub

and see the effect after a reboot.

There are many more ways to get better performance in Ubuntu. Few other things include removing unnecessary application from start up, disabling visual effects, cleaning up apt-cache, using system RAM for /tmp folder to increase I/O interaction speed. What is your favorite trick. Do you have some trick up your sleeve? Do let us know.

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