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I need to run a program off of a USB key. On first execution, it is excruciatingly slow. I've tried different USB drives, without much impact. My drive is formatted with ext4. Any way to speed this up?

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Have you done raw banchmarks? Eg time how long it takes to copy on and off a 1GB file (you can make a 1GB file with dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img bs=1024 count=0 seek=$[1024*1024] – Oli♦ Feb 16 '12 at 13:14
What would be the best way to measure this? – Kendor Feb 16 '12 at 23:00
you could do time mv file /media/usb/ to get an idea. The problem with writing to USB is it tends to buffer up (eg it looks like it's going really fast but it hasn't written anything to disk) so you need to measure the whole transfer and not just use the live speed. – Oli♦ Feb 16 '12 at 23:19
This question appears to be abandoned and unanswered, could you perhaps add more detail to your question? If this question no longer applies then you can either delete it or answer it yourself if you've solved the problem. Thanks! – Eric Carvalho Mar 18 at 23:56

closed as too localized by Eric Carvalho, vasa1, hhlp, Chris Wilson, The Lord of Time Mar 24 at 15:51

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