Question: What are your tips for improving overall system performance on ubuntu? Inspired by this [question](https://askubuntu.com/q/2099) I realized that some default settings may be rather conservative on Ubuntu and that it's possible to tweak it with little or no risk if you wish to make it faster.

This is not meant to be application specific (e.g. make firefox load pages faster), but system wide.

Preferably 1 tip per answer, with enough detail for people to implement it.

A couple of mine would be:

* Install [Preload](http://techthrob.com/2009/03/02/drastically-speed-up-your-linux-system-with-preload/) (via Software Center or `sudo apt-get install preload`);
* Change [Swappiness](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq) value - "which controls the degree to which the kernel prefers to swap when it tries to free memory";

What are yours?

PS: Since this is not intended to have a unique answer but rather, several useful tips, I'm making this community wiki out-of-the-box.

Answer: 
Put your /tmp directory into a ram disk

<https://superuser.com/questions/175861/ramdisk-ubuntu-10-04>
Found what was slowing down my machine: `gwibber-service`. Maybe because I have an account in twitter that follows a lot of people and when it refreshed the machine went bad.

I was monitoring the machine with top as said @kmassada and when it was really slow noticed the process. Then executing:

```
sudo sed -i 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g' /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

```

as @blasmat indicated to go through Startup Applications I could see that the service started automatically and I disabled it. Now my computer is much faster. I think there are still improvements I can make (I don't feel it at it top conditions), but after 20 hours of testing the performance I can say it really goes well.