[xubuntu-users] X-Ubuntu Experience [boot and wake]

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 12 Aug 2015 09:00:54 -0500
Victor Forberger <vforberger at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> On 08/12/2015 07:49 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
> > On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 19:10:39 +0530
> > V Narayanan <vn1980ca at outlook.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >> Negative Points:
> >> a) Slow Boot and Shutdown Time
> > 
> > How often do you boot? If you shut down every night (probably to
> > save power), and boot up every morning, and each takes one minute,
> > it hardly impacts your productivity at all. Just shut down and walk
> > away at night, and in the morning, power on and go get a cup of
> > coffee or tea, and by the time you come back, it's booted up.
> > 
> > SteveT
> > 
> > Steve Litt 
> > August 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
> > http://www.troubleshooters.com/tjust
> > 
> 
> Xubuntu booting was wicked fast with version 10.04 or 10.10 (or
> somewhere around then).  Much faster than previous versions, as a big
> effort was made back then to speed up booting.  I think it slowed down
> with 12.04 and has been getting slower since. I agree that with 15.04
> boot times are S L O W.

Hi Victor,

I don't have an Xubuntu VM formatted up, so if Xubuntu is significantly
slower to boot than Lubuntu (which I have as a VM), please ignore this
email :-)

Define wicked fast and slow?

Is wicked fast 1 second, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds?

Is slow 5 seconds, 20 seconds, a minute, two minutes, five minutes?

On my Qemu hardware assisted VM, which boots quite a bit faster than
metal, Lubuntu (I don't have Xubuntu handy right now) boots powerup to
GUI Display Manager in 8 seconds. ps ax | wc reveals 113 processes
running. Ubuntu systems do a lot of stuff.

By contrast, my Void Linux setup on Qemu boots Grub prompt to CLI in 6
seconds, and startx to LXDE GUI takes another 3, so it's actually slower
than Lubuntu. Void shows it's running only 90 processes in GUI. My
Funtoo VM takes 7 seconds Grub prompt to CLI and 2 seconds startx to
LXDE GUI, so it's likewise slightly slower than Lubuntu, and is running
only 76 processes.

I don't have an Xubuntu VM formatted up, but assuming Xubuntu and
Lubuntu are in the same ballpark, they seem (at least on my VMs) to be
doing well in boot speed with regard to their competitors.

And look what you're getting. Xfce has multiple panels, a lot more
configurability, and just more sophistication than LXDE.

If you figure boot time on metal is 2x that on a VM, then all of these
boots are below 20 seconds. The cases I can imagine where this 20
seconds would be material are if you keep hybernating (is that the
right word?) the thing and having to boot it back to its former state
between classes, or prior to a presentation, or something like that.

I've recently turned my attention to dracut, which creates an initramfs
sufficient to mount your root partition. I'm pretty sure in all modern
distros, a lot of the time is taken by initramfs. This is especially
true if the initramfs has to test everything to understand its
environment, before mounting /. With dracut, from what I understand,
you can answer a lot of those questions ahead of time, exclude a lot of
drivers you don't need, and speed things up. Maybe a lot. The downsides
of this is it would work only on *your specific host*, and that *buntu
uses systemd, which integrally connects itself to a dracut initramfs.
Obviously, if you make a new initramfs, make it with a different
filename so you can go back to the one that came with your distro.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
August 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
http://www.troubleshooters.com/tjust