slow start up Ubuntu 14.04

[Tommy Trussell]

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:03 AM, Tommy Trussell
<tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

sorry to reply to my own message, but I also notice your hard drive is
only reading at 35MB/s while my (internal laptop) drive is reading at
63MB/s. It looks like your USB port might be running at "USB 2.0"
speed. Do you have anything else (keyboard, mouse, scanner) on the
same USB bus? The hard drive really needs to be on its own bus, and
certainly not on a hub if you can avoid it. You might also try a
different cable, but unless it has been damaged that seems unlikely.

Since you said you were getting better performance on a previous
version of Ubuntu I would suspect the driver for your USB hardware or
possibly your drive controller.

You never said what model USB hard drive (or hard drive + controller
combo) you are using, but it might be worth mentioning, and/or a
couple of internet searches using those model numbers, "ubuntu," and
"slow."