Speed up AAOne

[karona]

Copied from a post by trumpeldor in the beginners section, dramatically increased the speed of my AA1, SSD version with Linpus and an extra half gig of RAM, it deserves a post of it's own in here.

Keith

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According to this post I found, concerning SSD, the following will greatly increase read and write performance on your SSD-disk (which happens to be the type of disk the Acer Aspire One has, the Linux-version anyway).

Simply do the following:

$ sudo su -
# mousepad /boot/grub/grub.conf

Now, add the elevator=noop option to the kernel-line, making this line:

kernel /boot/bzImage ro root=LABEL=linpus vga=0x311 splash=silent loglevel=1 console=tty1 quiet nolapic_timer

look like this:

kernel /boot/bzImage ro root=LABEL=linpus vga=0x311 splash=silent loglevel=1 console=tty1 quiet nolapic_timer elevator=noop

Save the file, close it, and reboot. Some have reported that there’s an increase in writespeeds going from 7.1MB/s to 9.1MB/s by adding this change. If it works or not, well, you can be the judge of that.



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I've been using it for several hours now, including several reboots, and it's stable and MUCH quicker.


Keith

[annafil]

hi there,

I applied this and the lappie does feel marginally faster - how did you test the read/write speed of the SSD? I'd like to run some benchmarks

[karona]

I didn't benchmark the performance before the mod, so cannot give a direct comparison, it just 'feels' much faster.


Keith

[MusicMeister]

The modification prevents the 'ordering' of information to be written to the drive. On normal hard drives this is faster because of the head seek times and it creates a much smoother transition of the head across the platter. On a SSD there is no head, or seek time. Because of this you can remove elevator process (what the ordering of data is called) and it speeds up I/O.

How much? I don't know... But I just added the statement to my AAO and will see what sort of performance 'increase' I 'feel' shortly... especially since I'm almost always skeptical...

[Colt45]

Visually this works GREAT! I was skeptical, but not now. Be sure to save your original grub.conf to a new name in case you want to go back.

[edgecrush3r]

Can anyone explan what the setting actually do?
Does this also work on HDD machines?

Cheers,
Tony

[esaym]

Can anyone explan what the setting actually do?
Does this also work on HDD machines?

Cheers,
Tony

It has to do with how the kernel orders disk i/o

ie, if a bunch of i/o requests come in, which one gets to go first.

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05 ... chedulers/

[jango]

Its SAFE to do that???

[annafil]

Its SAFE to do that???

yep pretty much, it's just a different way of handling data

[scotty1024]

This change is SAFE but whether it is SMART is based on what you are doing.

The issue is that it applies to all "disk" devices attached to the AA1. If all you have is SSD and SD/SDHC cards then it is the CORRECT setting as these devices don't need the kernel sorting I/O operations for them. This setting feeds blocks to the device ASAP and helps keep it well stuffed with data to write.

However, if you are attaching a HDD through the USB port then this setting will slow down write operations with that HDD. This setting would also be bad news for an AA1 with a HDD instead of a SSD as it would negatively impact write performance.

At some point the Linux kernel will need to be updated to support device specific I/O sorting. But for now you get to pick which device type you will be writing to the most.