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. ΓΆΓΆ
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