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How can I make Nautilus, or another program that is always loaded in swap memory, open instantaneously, like it does in OSX? OSX has the Finder and some programs always loaded in memory or 'minimized', so that they instantly open.

I would like to keep Nautilus always open/loaded in memory so that loading it is instantaneous. I have installed preload but it did not achieve the effect I want.

I have a MacBook 4.1 Core2Duo with 4GB of RAM.

Thanks in advance and greetings.

2 Answers 2

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Nautilus is already running, as it controls your desktop.

Since you have 4GB RAM, you should prefer to have the programs running in memory (RAM) rather than having them stored on the swap partition. I doubt that your swap is used at all.

You can verify with the free command.

             total       used       free
Mem:       3052684    2227020     825664
-/+ buffers/cache:     982204    2070480
Swap:      2200988          0    2200988

The value 0 above means that for this example, 0 bytes are used on the swap partition, and this is good. Instead, all of the files are loaded into the RAM so they can run much faster. buffers/cache is memory used to cache file structures, and is primed with the files that have been read with readahead.

If your computer feels somewhat slowish, look into the graphics driver that is being used.

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  • I don't think this is what Samuel meant. If you turn on nautilus once, you'll notice an improvement in startup speed. He wants it to always happen.
    – MarkovCh1
    Aug 26, 2011 at 20:42
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The linux kernel is very efficient at managing memory and typically, if we assume that you have plenty of RAM, a process will reside in physical memory in its entirety. However the linux kernel is smart and will still swap out parts of a process if it knows with relative certainty that the page is unlikely to ever be accessed again in the lifetime of the process.

That being said, you can encourage the kernel to keep things in memory and avoid swapping by setting the swappiness

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