Boot-time improvements

[Mackenzie Morgan]

On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 22:16 +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 02:43:42PM -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 12:57 +0200, Krzysztof Lichota wrote:
> > > That's what have been done by Microsoft for XP - they had the goal to
> > > bring boot time to 30s and managed to do it. Apparently they forgot to
> > > do the same for Vista ;)
> > 
> > But as mentioned before, they did it by shoving off a bunch of the stuff
> > til after the desktop shows so that it's unusable for a few minutes
> > after login while the hard drive churns away.
> > 
> > And 30s is considered bringing it down?  Wow, how long was it before?
> > Is there a goal we have for boot time?  30s seems about average for boot
> > time right now.  At least, all of my laptops boot in 25-35 seconds.
> 
> My laptop's (a year-old Lenovo T61) boot time varies between 0:46 and
> 1:28, according to /var/log/bootchart.  The usual time is around 1:00,
> and the differences are mostly due to services I had enabled at one or
> another time (apache2, samba, mysql).

Hrm, my 2-year old laptop takes bout 45 seconds to boot if I have MySQL,
Apache2, and MythTV's server set to start at boot.  Actually, the 4-year
old laptop might take about that long regularly...haven't booted that in
a while.  I wonder what causes such variation?  Certainly the processes
that need to start do, but a default install without any extra services
ought not to require more than 40 seconds on a laptop less than 2 years
old.  In cases where it does, there has to be a reason, but how do we
find it?

> There are some outliers (13 minutes) that, I think, indicate a bug in
> bootchart.  (I think it keeps generating the chart until I log in via
> GDM.  If I let the laptop sit idly for more than 15 minutes at the
> login screen, it eats multiple gigs of RAM and hours of CPU time trying
> to render the monstrous svg: http://launchpad.net/+bugs/218499)

I've seen a few bootcharts (once every few weeks) where I have a boot
time of about 2 minutes, but I think that's when fsck runs.  I'll have
to check next time fsck goes.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com
apt-get moo
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