> Many Linux distros (& course all versions of Windows) > pre-load certain components of popular application > programs to make them appear to run faster. It is > also common in Linux to implement a pre-linking > mechanism which substantially improve performances of > application programs.
With ftp://smarty.smart.net/pub/rlhamil/goodies/preload.c you can load and optionally lock into memory files listed on the command line; with the proper choice of files, browser startup could be speeded up by a couple of seconds. It might at least be useful to investigate what simple and application-independent tricks of that sort might be most helpful; for instance, rather than individual users preloading apps, one might wish to have SMF or an rc script do it at at startup time, for commonly used libraries as well as apps. There's also ftp://smarty.smart.net/pub/rlhamil/goodies/freemap.c which will evict files from the page cache; handy if one wants to have the same starting conditions for startup timing tests. NOTE: preload.c only attempts to lock pages if it's setuid root; it's not privilege-aware, so granting proc_lock_memory won't help. I suppose the simplest thing I could do is change it to try to lock pages if requested whether or not that would succeed, and to fall back to forcing page-ins (and for that, I suppose I could try madvise() with MADV_WILLNEED rather than reading the first byte of each page; the latter might do better by leaving the details up to the OS). > With SXCE (I am currently running Build 65, the > newest), I have noticed improvement of the loading > times of Firefox and Thunderbird after several power > on/off cycles. Caching of file pages in memory can speed 2nd and subsequent starts of an app shortly after an initial start and exit, but that does not persist across a power cycle. Only file contents (perhaps maintained by the app, such as whatever files it uses to cache web pages, mail messages, etc) persist across a power cycle, not memory contents. So the only way I can think of that Firefox or Thunderbird might start faster after "several power on/off cycles"' is if those files they maintained happened to fall into a more efficient state, which might happen if they for example age them at startup time. This message posted from opensolaris.org
