Sunday, May 18, 2008

Ubuntu CPU Performance Booster

I discovered the following today while surfing the net and reading multiple articles about Ubuntu:

Ubuntu automatically changes the CPU frequency of the system (on systems supporting this feature only of course such as Pentium M), and it is set to a default value of "ondemand" which means that the CPU frequency is changed dynamically according to the running applications demand. I discovered that this slows the system down much - as well as preserve energy which is important on laptops only - and reduce your satisfaction with the system.

To manually change this setting, you should:
  1. Add the "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" applet on any of your panels
  2. open the terminal and type "sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets" to allow manual configuration of the CPU frequency.
  3. Left-click the "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" applet and choose the highest frequency (don't worry :), the displayed frequencies are only those supported by your processor).
  4. You can do the same using the "cpufreq-selector" command from the command line.
  5. Enjoy the new performance :).
I just have one problem with this; which is that I couldn't set this option to always on, and I have to change it after every reboot (I don't have to repeat steps 1 and 2 of course, only step number 3. If you know a solution to this, please let me know, waiting for your comments!

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