i.came.to.get.down

Yes they are faster. Yes I can “feel” a difference. To be frank, things were stupid fast before, now it’s just ridiculous.

claire:~# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches ;time dd of=/dev/null if=/var/lib/mysql/ibdata1 count=2000 bs=512k
2000+0 records in
2000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 2.05422 s, 510 MB/s

real    0m2.063s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.376s

Real Benchmarks: http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=msch-29322-25051-20258

“I wonder what memcached is up to…”

ngrep -W none -T -d any "^(get|set|delete|END|STORED|VALUE|DELETED)" port 11211 | awk '{print $1 " " $2}'

“Thanks ngrep!”

If you’re unsatisfied with how fast your current browser eats up all your memory, you should probably be running Mr. Leaky himself, chromium-browser. Luckily, he’s fast enough to make us forget about all that wasted memory. But what about profiles and storing our cache in ram? Read on!

First off, let’s install this bad boy:

echo "" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "#chromium" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu lucid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu lucid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 4E5E17B5
apt-get update  && apt-get install chromium-browser

Sweet! The following is my launcher script that enables profiles and moves the cache dir to ram:

#!/bin/bash
PROFILE=$1
if [ ! $PROFILE ]
then
  PROFILE="Main"
fi

DATA_DIR="/home/msch/.config/chromium/$PROFILE"
REG_CACHE="$DATA_DIR/Default/Cache"
MEM_CACHE="/tmp/chrome-$PROFILE-cache"

# maybe we're creating a new profile?!
if [ ! -d $DATA_DIR ]
then
  mkdir -p $REG_CACHE
fi

# maybe we just rebooted, let's make sure we move our cache dir to ram!
# /tmp gets mounted tmpfs around here...
if [ ! -d $MEM_CACHE ]
then
  if [ -h $REG_CACHE ]
  then
    rm -f $REG_CACHE
    mkdir $MEM_CACHE
  else
    mv $REG_CACHE $MEM_CACHE
  fi
  ln -s $MEM_CACHE $REG_CACHE
fi

# now can we finally start?
/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser --restore-last-session --user-data-dir=$DATA_DIR

Double sweet! Name it something cool (chrome), make it executable (chmod +x chrome), and drop it in your path (mv chrome /usr/local/bin). Now we can create new profiles and launch existing profiles with reckless abandon.

chrome reader
chrome dev
chrome anydangthingiwant

Triple sweet.

Why? Cause the packages in testing don’t have vidmode enabled by default. (You only care about this if you don’t have RandR support.)
No, really, why? Cause I want to stop going to bed so late. I’d also prefer not to die from cancer. Maybe this will help…

apt-get source gtk-redshift
cd redshift-1.2/
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b
cd ..
dpkg -i gtk-redshift_1.2-2_all.deb redshift_1.2-2_amd64.deb

gtk-redshift -l 38.9:104.8 -t 5500:3400 -m vidmode &