Suggestions that may improve system & Firefox performance: Changing Ram-Swap usage; Disk caching; Forcing hardware acceleration on Firefox

Tutorials & Guides
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Things to do after installing Zorin OS 15 Core/Ultimate:

  1. Decrease Swap use.
    To check your current swappiness value, run in a terminal:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Next, decrease the default value. Open the configuration file in terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Scroll down the file and add this line at the end:

vm.swappiness=10

Save the changes and restart your computer. Now, Zorin OS will start writing files from RAM to a hard drive only when the RAM use reaches a high level.

2.Enable Drive Cache(For HDD users).
Usually, the program waits until the data is written to the disk and it proceeds to the next step only after the write event. However, you can force your programs to cache the data and write it to the disk with some delay. This can considerably improve the performance of your system.
To enable the hard drive cache, open the Disks application from the menu. Select the disk where Zorin OS is installed, go to the Drive settings menu and enable Write cache. This should slightly improve the performance of your HDD.

  1. Speed Up Firefox.
    Pop open your browser, type about:config in the address bar, and hit enter/return. Using the search box to find the layers.acceleration.force-enabled setting. Double-click on the ‘false’ listed under the ‘value’ column to set it to ‘true’. Be sure to quit the browser completely before relaunching it.
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Thank you Altand.

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