slow start up Ubuntu 14.04

[Tommy Trussell]

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 7:22 AM, Gary J. Kirkpatrick
<garyartista at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> > The whole thing is slow.  On 13.10 I was fully up and running in about
>>>> > 50 secs.   14.04 was that way at first.
>>>>
>
> try this-
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/q9a9zbebd6hdqze/gary14-trusty-20140519-2.png
>
> garyk

Hi -- I know next to nothing, but I installed bootchart and comparing
yours to mine I saw two long bars that seem to be slowing things the
most -- ureadahead (toward the top) and modprobe (near the bottom of
the chart but it aligns with the start of the process up on top).

I don't know how ureadahead works -- it's supposed to make your
booting faster -- but either it's not "playing" well with your USB
drive, or your drive is just slow grabbing the ureadahead file(s).
That accounts for about ten seconds of the delay.

I believe modprobe loads modules into the linux kernel. Why it is
taking so long to load modules? Maybe just because your USB connection
is slow, or maybe because the USB hardware is not being recognized by
the correct kernel driver. You might want to look for kernel module
messages in dmesg (a terminal command) and/or your /var/log/kern.log
and check the that the hardware of your USB ports and your drive
controller are recognized properly.

If you look at the charts on the bottom you will see that most of the
activity ("unint.sleep") is in usb-storage. That really makes me think
the slowdown is certainly USB related.

An aside --

I don't see that these things are slowing down your boot, but do you
know you are using samba (windows networking) or rtkit (linux
intrusion detection)? As I said those processes don't seem to be
blocking anything else on your bootchart, but they use some processor
and memory and if you don't use them and have forgotten you turned
them on you might want to turn them off. Also there's an
indicator-sound (startup sound, maybe?) that starts a long-ish
pulseaudio process. It doesn't seem to be blocking anything, but if
it's playing a long sound from your USB drive it might be contributing
to your slow throughput.

I hope someone else with more experience weighs in but I wanted to
chime in because I find this interesting.

For comparison, my bootchart is here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/553666/tommy-trusty-20140520-1.png