Accelerate the launch of programs using Preload

Preload is a daemon running in the background that collects information about the most frequently used programs, caches them and the libraries they use, which leads to an increase in the speed of program loading. Using Preload you can usefully spend gigabytes of unused RAM (of course, if you have them).

Installation

sudo apt-get install preload

or preload.sourceforge.net
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Customization

The program configuration is stored in the /etc/preload.conf file, the default values ​​should suit most users. But if you want to customize everything in your own way, you are welcome. Below are the most basic settings, details, as always in the documentation or in an article written by the developer Preload.

Option / Default / Description
model.cycle / 20 [seconds] / How often Preload will poll the system for programs and libraries used.

model.halflife / 168 [hours] / How often Preload will forget the old, accumulated information. Each time, the accumulated statistics will lose 50% of its value.

model.minsize / 2000000 [byte] / Something like a limit on the size of a program or library that Preload will pay attention to. If you want small programs to be cached - decrease the value, only for large ones, increase this value accordingly.

The use of memory is calculated by the formula:

(Total RAM x model.memtotal) + (RAM available at startup x model.memfree) + (Cache x model.memcached)

model.memtotal / -10%
model.memfree / 100%
model.memcached / 30%

Standard values, as already mentioned, should fit most people, so don’t change them unless you really need to.

Statistics

If you are wondering what resources Preload currently uses, you can look at this in its log file:
sudo tail -f /var/log/preload.log

More information can be obtained by looking at the file /var/lib/preload/preload.state

But you do not need to pay attention to all these files, there will be positive results without it.

And now the numbers

It will take a little time before Preload determines and understands your typical programs for work, so do not hope that an increase in download speed will occur right now.

Here are some of the comparative results from the article , to these measurements over several years, but this should not prevent you from seeing the relative performance of Preload.

Application	"Cold" Startup Time	Preloaded Startup Time	% Improvement
Desktop Login	30s	23s	23%
OpenOffice.org Writer	15s	7s	53%
Firefox	11s	5s	55%
Evolution	9s	4s	55%
Gedit text editor	6s	4s	33%
Gnome terminal	4s	3s	25%

I hope the information will be useful.
Based on Techthrob.com