On Wed, 02 Nov 2016 14:41:18 +0000, Mike Tomlinson wrote:

[sorry if this appears in the wrong place in the thread, most of it has
expired off my local spool]

I came across this IBM Developer Works page while looking for something
else. It's a clear and concise description of how partition misalignment
can impact on drive performance. The graphs provided show at a glance
just how bad this can be. The writer benchmarks three different drives
with various filesystems, with some surprises in the results.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/l...-sector-disks/


Note the emphasis in the article is on AF (4k sector) hard disks, but
the same principles apply to SSDs.

I noticed an interesting note about EB alignment for SSDs. However, the
mention of 3MiB EBs seems rather fanciful. The 1 and 2 MiB EB sizes seem
more believable if not too likely even today, 2 years on from the date of
that article.

Since we're discussing SSDs and Ubuntu, here's another site I'd like to
recommend.

https://sites.google.com/site/easyli...TEN-ESSENTIAL-
ACTIONS:

Unfortunately, the owner has borked the page with an anti- Ad blocker
giving visitors the choice of excluding his pages from Adblock plus or
else make a donation. The page is borked because even after disabling
Adblock plus in either Opera or (spit!) Firefox, I'm still met with that
"Paywall" nonsense.

When I last visited this site about a year ago, there was no such paywall
nonsense and it was quite a good source of useful and vital post install
configuration tasks to apply forthwith to the various popular Debian
derivatives such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

One of the vitally important changes when you're booting from an SSD is
to reduce the *default* swappiness from its rather quaint value of 60
down to a more appropriate 1. Very few people are going to be installing
a modern distro on a ram starved system - the swappines figure of 60
becomes a source of performance loss and, even worse, not good with swap
partitions (or files if you're a lazy *******) located on an SSD.

There were a couple of other settings relating to SSD issues but that's
the only one I can recall off the top of my head right now that doesn't
involve partition alignment issues.

There are probably alternative sites offering the same or similar advice
to the Linux newbie but ICBA to go searching right now, especially since
I may get a few pointers off the back of this follow up (if I'm lucky) to
save me the trouble. :-)


TNP: don't bother replying, I won't see it and care even less.

It seems that TNP's 'audience' is dwindling rapidly. I've had him
killfiled for the past 6 months or longer, initially because I was
getting heartily sick of his "potty-mouthed" political references. His
ghostly remains that keep popping up in follow up postings don't engender
a desire to remove him from my killfile filter either.

--
Johnny B Good