All operating systems freeze sometimes, and Ubuntu is no exception. What should I do to regain control when...
In what order should I try various solutions before deciding to pull the power plug?
What should I do when starting up Ubuntu fails? Is there a diagnostic procedure I can follow?
What are your tips for improving overall system performance on ubuntu? Inspired by this question I realized that some default settings may be rather conservative on Ubuntu and that it's possible to tweak it with little or no risk if you wish to make it faster.
This is not meant to be application specific (e.g. make firefox load pages faster), but system wide.
Preferably 1 tip per answer, with enough detail for people to implement it.
A couple of mine would be:
sudo apt-get install preload);What are yours?
PS: Since this is not intended to have a unique answer but rather, several useful tips, I'm making this community wiki out-of-the-box.
With previous versions of Ubuntu (using Ext3 filesystem) I used to tune it for better performance with noticeable results by setting the noatime parameter in /etc/fstab.
Is it still worth it to do that with the Ext4 filesystem, which is now default in Ubuntu? If so, does the procedure changed in some way?
An example of this tuning can be found here.
What steps should be taken before/during/after installation of Ubuntu on a Solid State Drive to optimize performance and ensure maximum durability of the drive?
When I open a RAM-intensive app (VirtualBox set at 2GB of RAM), some swap space is generally used, depending on what else I have open at the time.
However, when I quit that last application, the 2GB of RAM is freed up, but the same swap space use remains.
For example, right now, about two hours after having closed VirtualBox, I have 1.6GB free RAM and still 770MB in swap.
How can I tell Ubuntu to stop using that swap and to revert to using the RAM?