Improving Ubuntu GUI Resposiveness
August 17, 2006 | In: General
I ran across this on Digg under the title How to Make Firefox Over 40% Faster. While the improvement actually has nothing to do with Firefox, it does cover how to improve the CPU scaling settings.
Quick breakdown…
Uninstall powernowd
sudo apt-get remove powernowd
Enable speed-stepping (I’m running Centrino)
sudo modprobe speedstep-centrino
Enable the ondemand governor
sudo modprobe cpufreq-ondemand
This step is a change from Martin’s directions, his says to use sudo, but you can’t write to /sys with sudo, so
echo ondemand | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
Now it’s just a matter of updating your performance settings:
Open /etc/modules and add
speedstep-centrino
cpufreq-ondemand
cpufreq-ondemand
Install sysfsutils
sudo apt-get install sysfsutils
Add to /etc/sysfs.conf
devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor=ondemand
Basically what this is doing is stepping up the processor frequency if the CPU reaches 80% utilization.