Are you swapped? Increase the performance of Linux machine.

2010-07-14 2 min read Fedora Linux

With the ever increasing cost of the Hardware, the amount of physical RAM available on the system is increasing day by day. For example, couple of years back, I had a system which was very high end Desktop with 256MB RAM and today I have a 2GB RAM Desktop. So, whats the point.

The Linux systems (right word should be kernel) are desiged to use both RAM and swap partition. Swap partition is a partition on Hard disk and is used mostly like RAM. Problem is that HDD access is always slower than RAM access and hence inherently, the system will work little slower even if you have enough RAM not to use swap. The term ”swappiness” is used to determine how the kernel should try to seam-balance between the use of RAM and swap. By default, most of the distro’s have a swappiness of 60. A higher value of swappiness means that the RAM will be swapped out faster.

Logwatch for Linux Systems.

2010-06-02 2 min read Fedora Linux

On my personal <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/client" title="Client (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_%28computing%29">desktop at home, I like to see the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/statistics" title="Statistics" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics">statistics at least once a day, for what was installed, what was run with <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/sudo" title="Sudo" rel="homepage" href="http://www.sudo.ws/">sudo and other such details like <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/kernel" title="Kernel (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_%28computing%29">kernel errors.

Running this monotonously every day is quite boring, so comes to rescue is logwatch. I have <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/installation" title="Installation (computer programs)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_%28computer_programs%29">installation so I will talk about the location with respect to that so for your distribution it might be a little different.