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Bootup breakdown

Bootup breakdown

Posted Sep 22, 2003 14:28 UTC (Mon) by hathawsh (subscriber, #11289)
Parent article: Boot Linux faster (IBM developerWorks)

I run a 1 GHz Athlon Gentoo system that boots to KDE. Since the fan makes a fair amount of noise, I don't like to leave it running. So I've optimized the bootup speed as far as I can. Here is an approximate breakdown:

- 15 seconds from power-on to GRUB (can't do much about this.)

- 20 seconds from GRUB to the kdm login screen. I've hacked the boot scripts to make kdm start as early as possible. This is an easier way to parallelize startup than what the article describes. Hotplug and CUPS start while I'm typing my password.

- 30 seconds from entering my login password to kicker and kdesktop showing up. This is the part that's hard to streamline. I would really like to see an article that explains how I can divide this time in half. (Switching from KDE is not the right answer. ;-) )

FWIW, here's an idea I've been kicking around. A lot of the slowdown is due to hard drive seek time. Booting involves seeking all over the place. It would presumably be faster to load a big chunk from the disk rather than scattered small chunks. Therefore, it seems like rearranging files on disk and preloading disk caches could be a major win.


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Bootup breakdown

Posted Sep 23, 2003 1:22 UTC (Tue) by ue (guest, #15332) [Link]

Power down and disconnect powr-cord. Get a screwdriver
and replace the noisy fan.

btw, "starting" my system takes the nudge on the mouse/kb.

Bootup breakdown

Posted Sep 25, 2003 17:31 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

This is not a solution for the case where a machine is only used from time to time. It's a terrible waste to leave a machine powered up all the time just because starting it up is slow. A box using 100W (most PCs are probably more than that) costs about GBP 40/year to run continuously. My home box probably gets used about 2hrs/week - that's about GBP 0.60/year, so 'leave it turned on because the booting is slow' amounts to 98.5% energy wastage. Thats not good enough. Faster booting and/or lower power machines is important to a reasonable chunk of the population.

Bootup breakdown

Posted Oct 16, 2003 11:34 UTC (Thu) by ghakko (guest, #15291) [Link]

You might want to have a look at the upcoming "Software Suspend" feature.

http://swsusp.sourceforge.net

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