If you've installed Ubuntu on a USB key or SD card, you are probably experiencing the annoying slowness of Firefox. It freezes up for a couple of seconds every time you click a link. Like many things on Ubuntu, it doesn't work right out of the box and needs some tweaking. Fortunately, by following the tips below, you can make your USB or SD card based linux system fly!

Tip 1: Stop Firefox from writing to disk

Firefox 3 has a hard-to-fix bug that causes linux to write to disk every time you visit a write page. But it doesn't just write Firefox stuff -- it causes your entire system to dump all changes to disk. Unfortunately, your USB key might only have a 6 MB/s write speed, causing everything to freeze up.

1. Under the Privacy setting, uncheck "Keep my history for..."
2. Under the Advanced Tab, select Network and ensure that you use up to 0 MB of disk space for the cache.

Tip 2: Use preload

The preload daemon is a program that constantly looks at the programs you are running and figures out which ones you are most likely to use. When you start your computer, it automatically loads these programs and library from disk in the background, so when you start firefox, for example, it will pop up right away. The background is described in the author's Master's thesis.

It's kind of like putting magnets under your pillow to improve health. Maybe it's having an effect, but I can't tell. I install it anyway:

sudo aptitude install preload

Tip 3: Compress your files

This tip can wreck your system, and to undo it you will need to be able to use a command line editor like nano, emacs, or vim. At worst you will need to mount the USB key on another linux system to recover (by editing /etc/fstab). If you can't do that, then skip this tip.

On solid state storage, space is expensive. Ubuntu uses a huge amount of space will all the programs it installs. The /usr folder contains your programs, and it is usually 1.8 GB. Using squashfs, it can be compressed to 0.7 GB. Since read speeds are so slow, you can actually gain performance because there is less data to read. I've adapted these instructions from here.

Install squashfs and unionfs:

sudo apt-get install squashfs-tools unionfs-tools

Add the following lines to /etc/modules:

unionfs
squashfs
loop

Remove apparmor. Otherwise, the cups print server will stop working:

sudo apt-get purge apparmor

Make space for the filesystem:

sudo mkdir -p /.filesystems/usr/overlay

Compress your filesystem:

sudo mksquashfs /usr /.filesystems/usr/usr.sqfs

Add these lines to /etc/fstab:

/.filesystems/usr/usr.sqfs /usr squashfs ro,loop,nodev 0 0
unionfs /usr unionfs nodev,noatime,dirs=/.filesystems/usr/overlay=rw:/usr=ro 0 0

Switch to runlevel 1. (Ubuntu will close all open programs, then prompt you what to do. Choose opening a root shell)

sudo init 1

Move aside the old /usr directory and create a new mount point:

mv /usr /usr.old
mkdir usr

Test whether you previously edited fstab successfully by typing:

mount -a

If you get error messages or your /usr directory shows up empty, either fix your fstab or undo the changes before continuing.

Now reboot and make sure it all works:

reboot

If it works, remove the /usr.old directory to reclaim the space.

Tip 4: Use memory instead of disk

This tip can also lead to data loss. If you do it, you will have to always shut down your computer properly from now on, because unexpected power failures will lead to data loss.

Linux usually ensures that all changes are written to disk every few seconds. Since disk writes are so slow, you can change your system to keep things in memory longer. All changes will be written to memory, and the excruciatingly slow writes to happen in the background while you continue working. This has an instant, noticeable effect, but it can lead to data loss.

Add these lines to /etc/sysctl.conf, and reboot.

vm.swappiness = 0
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 20
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 0
vm.dirty_ratio = 80
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 0

The problem: using this tip means that your system stops writing changes to disk until you shut down or type "sync" at a command line. If your system loses power unexpectedly, you will get bad blocks. I did. You can limit the amount of data loss in the event of a power failure to one minute by setting vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 6000.

A side effect is that shutting down your computer will may take several minutes where it appears to be doing nothing. Don't cut the power until it's done, because it is busy writing all those changes to disk.

Want more programming tech talk?
Follow on Google Buzz
Subscribe to posts