e4rat -- defrag and preload for faster boot
For people who don’t have an SSD, e4rat ( available from http://e4rat.sourceforge.net/ ) is totally worth it. Whilst I have no scientific facts to throw at you, it’s definitely made my machine boot faster. And not just the boot to the login screen, as the preload runs for 120 seconds (by default, or until you kill it), so I just quickly logged in to X, ran chrome, a terminal, ssh and a few other things on top of the window manager etc.
So if you use a chunk of spinning metal for your boot/OS disk then head over to their site and download either the source or if you’re on Debian then install the provided deb (it’s not available via apt-get in the default repos yet).
Doooo iiiiitttt! :)
(If you’re using ext3, then you’ll need to convert to ext4 by following the instructions on https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Converting_an_ext3_filesyst... to convert it to ext4 before you can use e4rat)
