TC boot times

[Matt Oquist]

I know ogra and co are working on this problem in general, but it
might be worth mentioning my experience with this in here as well.

We have lots of very nice thin clients at a couple of schools, so
we've been running Edubuntu Edgy without any complaints about boot
times there. A test yesterday showed that one could log in 80 seconds
after booting, which is slower than LTSP 4.2 but not unreasonable at
all.

We have one collection of 12 old-ish laptops (650Mhz, 128MB) that take
5 minutes(!) to get to a login prompt with Edubuntu -- edgy or feisty.
In contrast, that same laptop takes 38 seconds to get to a login
prompt with LTSP 4.2. In further contrast, we have scads of Netier
thin clients (250Mhz, 64MB) that take only 1:50 to present an Edubuntu
(edgy or feisty) login screen.

We haven't done further testing yet to find out if any of the other
TCs in use in the district suffer from the same malady as the
particularly slow laptops, but have others run into strange issues
like this?

It's probably worth noting that the last 1:15 of the laptop's
5 minutes the 'gtk' greeter is pegging the processor, and this, at
least, is significantly longer than the same process takes on the
Netiers (with their much lower specs). I don't have any particular
ideas about why this should be the case. But since ogra's working on
a C implementation of ldm anyway, this part of the problem may just go
away.

--matt

--
Open Source Software Engineering Consultant
http://majen.net/