Simple speed tweaks

[Pablo the Duck]

It seems to me that the fastest way to run Mprime on a Linux box would be to close all non essential processes and programs, including X and to run Mprime from a virtual terminal.

Well, there are a couple of reasons what that would be inconvenient for me so I tried shutting down Mprime, using ctrl+alt+F4 to open up a virtual terminal and running Mprime from that and I got some results which I found a little surprising:

Machine 1, 600mhz Athlon, 32meg ATI graphics card currently running an LL test. Iterations using KDE and console timed at .393 secs. Using virtual console F4 (X still running in F7) the iterations dropped to 0.384 a gain of 2.29%

Machine 2, 2.66 P4 onboard graphics, LL testing, iterations 0.064 in a Gnome terminal. Switching to virtual terminal F4 dropped the iterations to 0.055 a gain of 14%

Machine 3, 1.5 Celeron (with SSE2), onboard graphics, factoring 2^67 in an Eterm under Fluxbox was coming in at about 250 secs, switching to virtual terminal F4 seemed to actually slow things down to 251 secs.

I can't understand the result for machine 3 but the moral of machines 1 & 2 seem to be that, if you run Mprime in a virtual terminal and ctrl+alt into that terminal when you don't need X you can pick up a useful speed boost on LL tests - especially if you have onboard graphics.

I'd be interested in hearing any other tweaks you might have which would boost the speed of Linux boxes without adversely affecting their usability as desktop machines.