How to manage your machine's background processes. In common with other parts of the early Unix operating system, the term 'daemon' gives little away about what its function might be.
A daemon is a task that runs in the background, and there's a small army of them that are started when you fire up your machine. There are daemons for controlling automated tasks, daemons for managing power and CPU use, daemons for printing and daemons for writing the system logs. Some denote their status by ending with the letter 'd', while others prefer the anonymity of names like 'binfmpt-support' or 'brltty'.
Daemons are obviously an important part of the running environment. But there's also a slight problem. Without any divine inspiration, the average Linux distribution can't accurately guess which daemons are going to be of use to you, and which aren't. The result is that they'll normally play it safe and err on the side of caution.
This means that your desktop may include a laptop power management daemon, or Bluetooth tools, neither of which may be of great use. These will still get loaded up and use valuable memory, so you can save boot time and memory by spending a little time pruning your daemons, and fitting them to your own requirements. The trick is knowing which ones to cut.
read more | digg story
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment