4 ms·
I remember reading a blog post ca. 2005, before SSDs were common, in which the author explained how he had identified all the files his system needed to boot an
by CrazyStat 7y ago
I remember reading a blog post ca. 2005, before SSDs were common, in which the author explained how he had identified all the files his system needed to boot and the order in which they were read from disk, and then contrived to put them all in the correct order in a contiguous block at the start of the drive to eliminate seeks during boot entirely. This apparently shaved a couple seconds off his boot time.
- dspillett 7y agoThere are automated solutions to this. Windows has had similar tricks built in (at various levels of cleverness, depending on the Windows variant you run) for a while now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher No doubt there are similar options for Linux and other OSs. A similar trick I've seen is using a small SSD as a manual cache: copy in the files that need to be fast and mount it with the larger filesystem (on slower drives) as a unioned filesystem. Though just using block device based automatic cacheing may be easier and safer than rolling your own mess. There are a few options for Linux though some are not currently maintained (see https://serverfault.com/questions/969302/linux-ssd-as-hdd-cache https://serverfault.com/questions/969302/linux-ssd-as-hdd-ca... amongst other places), and some IO controllers support it directly (even some motherboards have this built in) without needing to bother your OS with the details at all.