The myth of Linux tweaking

My latest Netrunner Magazine article - Linux tweaking is placebo. Plain and simple. Now read.

http://netrunner-mag.com/the-myth-of-linux-tweaking/


Cheers,
Mrk

 

Tweaking, no. Workarounds for bugs, yes.

e.g. There was a bug in the earlier 3.x kernels with transparent hugepage support, for instance, that would cause the desktop to lag hugely when copying files to or from a USB device on many machines. Turning off transparent hugepages would invariably fix it. And maybe 50% of distros shipped with affected kernels and transparent hugepages turned on at that time. Whoops.

Most Linux distros, especially corporate ones like SUSE, have always had rather poor quality control IMO.

(And let's not get started on eyecandy and desktop bloat, which IMO is responsible for 95% of the current issues with desktop Linux.)

Edit: tl,dr tweaking is a myth, bad default settings are not.

 

You're talking about madvise, always and never setting for THP, yup. A different category.
Mrk

 

There is a lot of heresay when it comes to tweaks. Yes logically based on documentation various tweaks and settings are faster, but they are seldom backed by real world before/after measurements so show there was a limitation in place to need improving upon.

 

Re the OP, one of the general rules of programming is that optimizations won't get you nearly as far as using better algorithms. A compiler can't squeeze O(n) performance out of an O(n^2) algorithm.

IMO one can generalize that rule to desktop computing. You can't get good performance out of slow software; you have to find faster software.