Startup Time (Was: Re: What do you like best about Ubuntu?)

[Daniel Borgmann]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 22:56 +0100, Benjamin Roe wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 17:39 -0400, Chris wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 13:58 -0700, George Farris wrote:
> > > The windows boot time is actually not correct. Even though Windows
> > > "looks" like it has booted it is still unusable for some seconds after,
> > > due to the continued boot in the background.
> > 
> > Not true.  In 17 seconds my system is usable and just a couple seconds
> > later I was already using Visual Studio.  The GUI was usable as soon as
> > it came up.
> 
> I'd agree that this is a problem, but it's not impossible to fix. The
> distro I used before Ubuntu, Arch Linux, booted in about half the time
> Ubuntu takes.

Have you timed this? Because it would be very encouraging... I timed the
startup times (Grub to loaded desktop with auto login) of FC2, Ubuntu
and Win XP. My results are: FC2 68 seconds, Ubuntu 52 seconds, Windows
30 seconds. So not as bad as I expected and both FC2 and Ubuntu were
loading some additional services like Apache and the mysql daemon.
Without those, Ubuntu was starting in 45 seconds.
But still I wish this would be a lot faster. GDM should load very soon
and it would be just great if non-critical services could be loaded
after the GUI is ready (and/or while the user is logging in). Also I
heard about alternative init scripts which load services in parallel,
which is supposed to be a lot faster. Is there any reason why this isn't
common practice? Are there problems which can't be worked around?


-- 
Daniel Borgmann <spark at mayl.de>