Guide To Improving File System Performance In The Digital Intelligence Era: Factors, Technologies And Evaluation Methods
Say goodbye to lag! Five file system speed-up secrets secretly collected by senior digital bloggers
I would like to ask you, do you often encounter the situation where your mobile phone or computer freezes as if playing a "slideshow" during use? To open a folder, you have to go around slowly for a while? Don't rush to smash the computer yet. This situation is most likely not caused by the aging of the hardware, but by your file system that is working slowly. As a veteran who has been in the digital field for a long time, today I would like to sincerely share a few practical tips that can instantly improve the response speed of your device, so that your beloved device can return to its peak state!
1. Awakening the sleeping "cache" black technology
Did you know that there is a super "temporary worker" hidden in your device, and its name is caching technology . The system will temporarily store your frequently used data, such as commonly used apps and documents being edited, in an extremely fast cache . It's like moving frequently used tools from the warehouse to the workbench at hand.
However, in many cases, this so-called "temporary worker" is not fully utilized. In Windows systems, you can indirectly affect cache efficiency by optimizing virtual memory settings. Setting the initial size and maximum value of virtual memory to 1.5 to 2 times that of physical memory, and placing it on a non-system disk (preferably on an SSD solid state drive) can effectively increase the data exchange speed. For Mac users, the cache management of the system itself is already extremely smart, maintaining sufficient free hard disk space (it is recommended to reserve more than 10%), which is the greatest support for cache.
2. Cleverly design "preloading" to let the system be aware of it in advance
Have you ever noticed that when you open a certain software again, its speed is much faster than when you first opened it? Behind this is a technology called "data prefetching" at work. Based on the study of your usage patterns, the system predicts what you may use later and loads the data from the slow disk into the memory in advance.
On Windows, there is a hidden service called SysMain , which was formerly called Superfetch. The system usually manages it automatically. However, if your computer is equipped with a mechanical hard drive, turning on this service will significantly increase the speed of startup and application loading. Find it in the "Services" manager and make sure the startup type is "Automatic". If you are already using NVMe SSD , the effect of this feature may not be significant, but it will not have a negative impact.
3. The “space magic” of compression and organization
Disk space gradually becomes smaller, and read and write speeds decrease. At this point, compression technology comes into play. The compression function of the NTFS file system itself can transparently compress files or folders that are rarely used, thereby reducing the actual disk space occupied. Although reading and writing compressed files will consume some CPU resources, for situations where CPU performance is relatively sufficient and disk I/O (input/output) constitutes a bottleneck, this is undoubtedly a clever way to "exchange computing for speed".
The key is to reduce debris regularly. For mechanical hard drives, regular "disk defragmentation" can reconnect scattered file fragments into a complete piece, thereby greatly improving the continuous read and write performance. The situation with SSD is exactly the opposite. Never defragment it! The TRIM instruction that comes with the system, which is an SSD optimization instruction, is its good partner. It can clean up invalid data blocks when it is idle to maintain its writing performance. Win10/11 system will execute automatically without manual intervention.
4. The “Art of Micromanaging” of I/O Scheduling and Logging
How disk read and write requests are arranged by the operating system depends entirely on what is called the I/O scheduling algorithm . Users of Linux systems can try to adjust the scheduler according to the hardware. For example, for traditional mechanical hard disks, using the mq-deadline scheduler can achieve relatively good throughput; however, for high-performance SSDs , the none (or noop ) scheduler can reduce the delay because it reduces unnecessary queuing.
Let’s continue talking about the log and recovery mechanism . Take file systems such as ext4 as an example. To ensure data security, the log will be written first and then the data will be written. But if you are pursuing the ultimate performance and the requirements for data security are not extremely strict (such as for cache disks or game disks), then you can try to use data=writeback mode when mounting to reduce one write operation in exchange for performance improvement. Of course, this requires you to have a certain foundation in the Linux command line.
5. The “ultimate combination” of hardware and applications
If the software tuning reaches its due level, then the hardware must also keep up. Optimizing hardware configuration is the most direct way to achieve improvement: changing the mechanical hard disk to SATA SSD will bring about a qualitative change, and then further upgrading from SATA SSD to NVMe SSD is a quantitative change. If you are the kind of user who needs large-capacity storage, setting up a RAID array, also known as a disk array, can also greatly improve concurrent reading and writing capabilities.
Don't forget, application optimization . Many software, by default, will place cache and temporary files on the system disk. Over time, they become "disk killers". Develop good habits and move the download path and cache directory to a partition with sufficient space in the software settings. At the same time, you must learn to use the task manager to find out those "rogue software" that crazily read and write disks, disable those that should be disabled, and uninstall those that should be uninstalled.
Starting from the cache prefetching at the bottom of the system, through matching and optimizing the hardware configuration, to fine-tuning your daily usage habits, after this series of actions, your device will definitely look brand new. It is not difficult to make a machine, the key is to be willing, so hurry up and give it a try!
