Linux distributions (specially Debian and based on, which I am going to use through this guide) have a perfectly stable configuration out-of-the-box, but it is always possible to tweak things to speed up the performance in our system, including general response, boot time, network speed, and many others. Also, I’d like to share this guide to encourage you to collaborate on it, especially in adding tweaks in the comments for those applications or hardware I am not user of, like Gnome or nVidia. As it was said: This guide will head you to different tweaks that will increase the performance of your system, BUT:
Be aware that all modifications are made as root user, so you may need to omit some steps if you don’t know what exactly are you doing!
System tweaking
Swappiness
Swappiness is the ammount of virtual memory (swap partition) your computer is ordered to use. It is set to 60% in newer kernels, but computers with a high ammount of RAM can run faster if less memory is swapped and more is directly used. For computers with 1GB RAM or more, a value between 0 and 5 works well. You can check the performance you get modifying the swappiness with the command: