Speedup Application Startup Times with Preload

There are some applications that you use more often than others, the browser or media player for example. There is an application available that monitors what applications you use and after establishing the most recurring applications, it will load them faster in the future.

"preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times."

To install Preload in Ubuntu you can use the following command:

sudo aptitude install preload

I have been using it for a few months now and have seen a noticable decrease in the time it takes to load Firefox, Openoffice and Gimp. Not everyone will see a difference, if you have an older computer with 512mb or more this application may come in handy. As cool as this application is, it will not make your computer boot up any faster. Preload may take some time to establish a pattern so be a little patient.