Old hardware? Want a faster boot up? Need to free some system resources? Want snappier applications? This is for you. Note, I wouldn’t suggest doing anything within this if it doesn’t make sense to you.
It has been well-documented that Ubuntu’s readahead system during boot significantly cuts down on boot time by reducing hard disk seeking via precaching commonly-used files during bootup. This feature, however, only lasts up to the GDM screen. The average modern PC should be able to boot Ubuntu from GRUB to the GDM screen in under 30 seconds — roughly half of what it would be if readahead were to be turned off.
(more…)