Thread: How low slim should the root filesystem be?
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retsaw is offline retsaw
2011-01-24 , 14:18
Posts: 701 | Thanked: 585 times | Joined on Sep 2010 @ London, England
#4
Originally Posted by VulcanRidr View Post
When PR1.3 came out, I had to completely reflash the N900. In the months since then, it seems like the device has become more sluggish. I have had things like MediaBox and FBreader, at random times, stop responding, apps seem to take longer to open...However, when I take a look at htop or conky, the CPU is at idle and it is not using that much memory (currently CPU is at 5%, RAM usage 179MiB of 249MiB. swap is at 112MiB of 2GiB).

I was skimming the forums and found a thread (that I can't seem to locate again) that stated that the root fileystem may be the culprit...

So I was wondering, coming from a desktop Linux environment, how much do I need to slim down the root filesystem and will that gain my performance back? Currently, root is sitting at 67%:

Code:
Filesystem   1k-blocks              Used          Available   Use%         Mounted on
rootfs           233344               15297              76264     67%          /
I can symlink /var/lib/ (specifically /var/lib/dpkg) into /home, which would save me about 30MB. Would there be a (noticeable) performance benefit to moving 30mb of dpkg into /home and dropping the root filesystem from 67% to 50%?

Thanks,
--vr
The rootfs is compressed and /var/lib/dpkg is mostly text files so compresses very well, when I moved it to /home I only gained about 10MB. When doing it I didn't notice any slowdown with the app manager, but I didn't think to benchmark, so there could've been some I didn't notice, but why would moving files from a compressed to an uncompressed filesystem cause a slowdown?

And why exactly do you have 2GB swap? If your apps need that much the constant swapping would make the device unusable, even the default 768MB is excessive.

It would be interesting to read that thread where you originally read this to see if there were any conclusions as to why, if it isn't close to being full the only thing I can think is fragmentation. With your rootfs at only 67% I shouldn't think any slowdown is being caused by lack of space.