Dapper vs. Breezy LiveCD boot time/memory usage

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 05:10:55PM +0000, Chip Piller wrote:
> The boot time and memory usage of the May 12 release of the Ubuntu
> dapper-live-i386 LiveCD was compared to the Breezy final LiveCD on three
> different computers. 
>  
>                           Boot Time        Memory usage
> System                  dapper/breezy    dapper/breezy
> =================================================================== 
> Pentium 4-1.5GHz          4:39/4:19        476k/430k
> Pentium III-1GHz          2:52/3:40        472k/435k
> AMD64-3200+               3:41/4:44        487k/449k      
> 
> Memory usage was determined by waiting until the liveCD had completed booting
> and then launching a terminal window and using "free" command.
> 
> Boot times were about 22% faster on two systems running dapper and about 8%
> slower on the third system. 
> 
> Memory usage reported by "free" was approximately 9% higher for all systems
> running dapper.

The boot time statistics are very interesting, and I appreciate your
collecting them.  The memory usage figures, however, are not indicative of
actual memory requirements, and are severely skewed by the use of memory for
cache by the kernel.  The actual memory requirements are unfortunately
difficult to measure; the most reliable method is to use a binary search to
find the lowest value for the mem= kernel parameter which still provides
reasonable performance.

-- 
 - mdz