Linux Optimising SSD+RAM Usage for XBMC Gotham + Ubuntu 14.04
#1
Question 
Following a number of Ubuntu upgrades as recommended by various forum members on another thread, in particular a new GPU, moving to an SSD for the OS drive and also installing 14.04 x64, I wondered what optimisations can be implemented to further improve / optimise performance and playback.

I'm running a C2D @ 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 4GB GT 640, 2 x 250GB SATA drives - everything is SATA 2 as that is all the motherboard can handle. RAM usage is seldom above 2GB and the swap file never seems to get used.

I've done a bit of digging and so far it looks like reducing 'swappiness' to 0 seems like a good option. I've also read a little about symbolic links and putting them into a ram drive.

I wondered if anyone has done this and if they have seen a noticable difference on a box that is primarily used for XBMC?

It would also be good to know if any there are any temporary files / folders generated by XBMC [not logs] which are used for streaming that are worth creating symbolic links for and putting into a ram drive?

I've seen threads regarding the cache buffer size which also seems worth a look at. Possibly to 1GB [which will multiply by 3]. I also wondered if the cache buffer size includes all the different types of streams that addons generate [including YouTube] so that they are stored in RAM and the stream isn't written to the SSD - thus increasing the lifespan of the SSD slightly.

Lastly, are there any other recommends that anyone has regarding optimising performance for an SSD drive and 8GB RAM please?
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#2
Setting vm.swappiness=0 in your sysctl.conf is fine
Also, did you enable TRIM on your SSD?
http://www.howtogeek.com/176978/ubuntu-d...-yourself/
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#3
Thanks for your reply.

I'll set swappiness tomorrow and see how things perform Smile

I'm running 14.04 and am using the TRIM via the Cron Weekly job which was setup by default. Hopefully its doing it's job Smile
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#4
You can move /tmp (and other folders to ram), see http://askubuntu.com/questions/173094/ho...mum-amount

Also the automatic fstrim in 14.04 only works on some ssd's, frpm the cron job file,

Quote:This only runs on Intel and Samsung SSDs by default, as some SSDs...
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#5
Thanks for the info.

Out of curiousity do you know if XBMC uses /tmp for temporary downloading streams to, or does it use another location?

The reason I'm asking is because of I create a ram disk for /tmp and set the ram disk to be 2Gb for example, I could then set the cache buffer size to 512MB [which would potentially be 1.5GB], and if XBMC uses /tmp to download streams to then everything will fit nicely?

Regarding TRIM, inside the FSTRIM file I have the 'exec fstrim-all --no-model-check' line. If I run this from a command line then it closes down the terminal window. If I run 'fstrim -v /' then I get a result saying that x bytes were trimmed. Is it safe to assue from that that Trim will work ok from the Cron job?
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Optimising SSD+RAM Usage for XBMC Gotham + Ubuntu 14.040