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Re: Question regarding hardware choices

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TL;DR: Full installation on internal SSD is fastest,
       live (with or without persistence) is slower.

Semih Ozlem writes:

> Hello everyone,
>
> In comparing performance what are the pros and cons to using

What kind of performance do you look for?

 * CPU performance will mostly be equal for any of the methods

 * For things like network and GPU the properly installed systems
   (independent of device type used) can be faster due to the
   ability to install proprietary drivers. E.g. if you have an
   NVidia graphics chipset and install the proprietary driver,
   3D performance improves.

 * For the speed related to the boot media, there are at least
   these scenarios to consider:

    - system startup
    - installing system updates
    - running applications

> (i) live usb flash disk
> (ii) live usb with persistence on a flash disk
> (iii) full installation on a flash disk
> (iv) full installation on an external hard disk (ssd or other)
> (v) full installation on an internal hard disk (ssd or other)

>From slowest to fastest, I'd order your choices as follows:

system startup (slow -> fast)
(ii), (i), (iii), (iv), (v)

 * persistence slows down things due to additional mount
 * live systems take longer to boot than regular ones
   (less parallelism, automated user creation etc.)
 * (iii) - (v) are highly dependent on how fast the actual
   storage device is. An external NVMe SSD at USB 3.0 can
   easily beat an internal PATA HDD (just to have two extremes :) ).

installalling system updates
(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

 * installing updates to live systems is slow because it
   requires a complete re-image (difficult to do from within the system)
 * installing updates with persistence incurs some performance
   penalties (during and after installation) depending on how it
   is implemented
 * for (iii) - (v) it is again dependent on the actual hardware

running applications
(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

 * installed systems are faster because they need not
   re-create any of the application's directories etc. after
   first use of the respective application.
   Additionally, there is no need to use RAM for all of the
   current changes to the system state -- things like configuration
   files and installed upates are written back to the storage drive.
   As a result, more RAM is available for caching purposes and
   applications.

 * persistence may be faster than without because you can avoid
   re-installing applications manually.

 * There is one special case: Some live systems can be booted `toram`
   copying the whole image into RAM. As RAM is faster than the persistent
   storage options, this may have the best performance in certain cases.
   Hence, one could also order this (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (i) with
   (i) having the "top performance".

Just my take on this, other good opinions exist, just see the other   
replies :)

HTH
Linux-Fan

PS: I had some issues sending this, I hope it arrives threaded correctly.

öö

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Question regarding hardware choices Semih Ozlem <semihozlemlinuxuser@gmail.com> - 2021-02-19 16:50 +0100
  Re: Question regarding hardware choices Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> - 2021-02-19 17:10 +0100
    Re: Question regarding hardware choices Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2021-02-19 17:20 +0100
  Re: Question regarding hardware choices Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> - 2021-02-19 18:30 +0100
    Re: Question regarding hardware choices Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2021-02-19 21:00 +0100
      Re: Question regarding hardware choices Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2021-02-19 21:30 +0100
  Re: Question regarding hardware choices Linux-Fan <Ma_Sys.ma@web.de> - 2021-02-19 19:00 +0100
  Re: Question regarding hardware choices David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2021-02-19 21:40 +0100
    Re: Question regarding hardware choices Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> - 2021-02-19 21:50 +0100
      Re: Question regarding hardware choices David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2021-02-19 22:50 +0100
        Re: Question regarding hardware choices Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2021-02-19 23:10 +0100
          Re: Question regarding hardware choices David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2021-02-20 03:30 +0100
            The Elephant and the Philospher [was: Question regarding hardware  choices] <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2021-02-20 10:00 +0100

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