Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 25th Feb 2008 20:11 UTC, submitted by Nemilar
Preload is a Linux daemon that stores commonly-used libraries and binaries in memory to speed up access times; similar to Windows Vista's SuperFetch function. This article looks at Preload and gives some insight into how much performance is gained for its total resource cost.
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Member since:
2005-07-13
openSUSE has been using this since 10.0, it was originally part of the now-defunct SUPER project, but the results were significant enough that they included the preload functionality in the main release.
In openSUSE, though, preload is targeted at specific apps, not coincidentally those that tend to have the longest startup times (FF, OOo2, GDM, KDM, Gnome, KDE, etc.), so I'm not sure that it really resembles SuperFetch in that fashion, at least from the "learning" POV. It's basically preset with static entries.
From the link above to the RH article, I guess that is an advantage to their implementation. The drawback though is that the performance advantage goes out the window if those preload files aren't kept up-to-date. I believe there was an issue previously where the gnome preload files were out of date, and it actually impeded the load time for GDM/Gnome rather than improve it.
You can also create your own static entries for preloading, but it's a bit of a convoluted method and not something for Joe Average to try.
So it will be interesting to see where the improvements to preload take it.
In all honesty, from previous experimentations, I've often found a better, or at least more perceptible, performance boost from prelinking, but then that can be problematic as well.