For the most part, you should plan on shutting down a system before tuning it (after making backups!). Tuning doesn't take too long and is a lot simpler to do if the system is offline. First off, you should check out your existing filesystem settings with: # tune2fs -l /dev/hdXY 1) Directory indexing - Which helps ext3 deal with any directories that have lots of files. (See the Gentoo Forum link for explanations of why.) # tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/hdXY # e2fsck -D /dev/hdXY The first command changes the ext3 system to use directory indexing for all new directories, the second command updates all existing directories. 2) Journal mode # tune2fs -O has_journal -o journal_data /dev/hdXY I prefer full journaled mode. The "-O has_journal" should be unnecessary (all ext3 file systems have journals after all) but probably ensures that things work if you accidently run it on a ext2 filesystem. 3) Journal size This requires poking around a bit to find out what your current journal...