On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 12:59:39PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote: > Other interesting ideas are disabling unecessary system services that desktop > users certainly do not need, as a group, like gpm. Furthermore, killing dumb and Gnome 8) That really does speed the box up ;) > cron jobs that run every day like 'updatedb' and 'makewhatis' would help make > the desktop experience a hell of a lot better (geez, run them every 3 days and > only when the machine has been idle for 5 minutes or something, and re-nice them > really really really low so they don't screw over the user). Nice won't help here or they would be niced. The problem is they hammer the I/O subsystem and the I/O on a desktop PC is completely incapable of sustaining any kind of useful load. On a scsi box with decent disks you dont even notice it. There are things that might help such as putting sleeps through these programs so they will tick slowly through the process.