In many situations we need every bit of resources from our servers. The main resource needed on all systems is RAM. Disabling some unneeded services will free a lot of memory.
The proper way disabling a service from being started on boot is to use the “chkconfig” utility.
Here is a list of services that can be disabled without affecting the OS in a situation when you host a WEB, DHCP, DNS, FTP or your using the server as a ROUTER.
chkconfig acpid off
chkconfig atd off
chkconfig autofs off
chkconfig cpuspeed off
chkconfig cups off
chkconfig gpm off
chkconfig haldaemon off
chkconfig isdn off
chkconfig mdmonitor off
chkconfig messagebus off
chkconfig netfs off
chkconfig nfslock off
chkconfig openibd off
chkconfig pcmcia off
chkconfig portmap off
chkconfig rawdevices off
chkconfig rpcgssd off
chkconfig rpcidmapd off
chkconfig smartd off
chkconfig xinetd off
You can disable same service typing in terminal the “setup” command and selecting System Services menu. You can turn off “microcode_ctl” if this is an AMD machine, and “irqbalance” if there is only one CPU. If you plan on using plug and play devices you should leave “haldaemon” and “messagebus” running. If you did not do a minimal install you’ll have more services enabled.
If you are not sure what something does, you can look in the particular service’s startup script to see the comments at the beginning. The scripts are in the /etc/init.d directory.