Comments on: Boot times: Does anyone actually care?

By: Wurst

Wurst — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:56:34 +0000

I don’t care. Yadda yadda.

Suspend and resume is finally fixed with 2.6.30 (according to Linus and he should probably know best).

So why not have both?

All these posts are pointless. It is not like all boot optimizers will magically fix some other shortcoming if they do not spend time on boot time.

You my friend lack basic understanding how FOSS works.

By: Bert Van de Poel

Bert Van de Poel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:43:35 +0000

I do care as well, because I have loads of servers running on this PC booting is slow. Any way to make it boot faster would be great.

Also, I hate it when I have to wait if I need my laptop right away.

(Yes I know I should stop autostarting servers and buy a descent laptop but that’s not the point)

By: François

François — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:48:35 +0000

Not only for student, but for professionnal use too: our sales rep don’t take their laptop on the field that much, because XP gets slower and slower to boot with time. It’s clearly NOT convenient to wait 3 minutes for your laptop to boot if you want to show something to a customer. Now they have some Dell Mini 9 netbooks with Ubuntu, and thanks to the small size and very reliable boot time, they use them on the field. The faster the better.

By: spaetz

spaetz — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:12:07 +0000

I DO, thank you very much. I see your question pop up regularly, and just as regularly about 50% of all people shout that they need it. Why can’t you just accept that some peoples use pattern is different from yours? You might be happy to make coffee while your stove warms up, but when I enter the office, I want to start working, especially after having sat down to type in my user/passwd.

By: CAS

CAS — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:57:48 +0000

Just to add my 2 cents.

1. On the desktop….no. (Its never off except for kernel updates or nvidia driver updates)…and its a screamer so boot times are sub 30 seconds anyway.

2. Laptop, yes it matters because its convenient to be up and running quickly from a standing stop and just cuz.

By: Miles

Miles — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:07:25 +0000

Yes, a 65 seconds long Crunchbang boot on a Eee 701 is really an obstacle to using it regularly for me.

By: David

David — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:24:33 +0000

@Alex: Thanks for the link to the presentation. It covers a good number of reasons to have faster boot times.

By: Rusty

Rusty — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:00:27 +0000

Speed for boot time is important for several reasons. On a stable desktop, it may not be all that important. It isn’t for my primary desktop at home, or my server desktop at work. Both are on almost continuously, only reloading when there has been a kernel update or some software package that can’t just be reloaded on it’s own (ssl updates seem to fall into this catagory.) For those systems, it doesn’t really bother me if it takes 5 min to come up.

On the other hand portable systems need to be able to be started fast, and being able to demonstrate that condition is very important. If you are evangelizing linux to someone at a coffee shop, and you decide that showing the individual something is going to be the way to make them aware of what you mean, odds are you are going to have to turn on your computer. (I don’t leave my laptop on all the time, and I certainly don’t leave it on when going from one place to another. I don’t quite live within my computer, so just because I am sitting down at a table at a coffee shop, or something, does not mean that I’m going to have the computer turned on and waiting for me to show off this tidbit or that. I’ll have to turn the computer on.

There’s a lot of great things about suspending to ram, suspending to HD, hibernating, etcetera. However I don’t always want to have everything that’s on my desktop when I shut down to be there when I go to show off the computer. In fact if I have a couple or three browser windows open on different desktops, an image editing application up, and some video footage that I’ve been working on, all come up out of hibernation, It does not necessarily mean that I will have impressed the potential user.

In any case the one thing you do not want to do is start by showing a system that takes as long as their home or work computer to boot up. You want to start off by impressing them with the fact that you can do something as soon as possible after hitting the power button. Not some 3 minutes later.

So while I don’t have a tremendous need to have a fast boot on my home desktop and work server, I do want a fast boot or my laptop at home.

Likewise if my server at home is going to take 30 min to boot, I’m not going to be very happy about systems that loose their address while they wait for the dhcp server to restart, I’m going to be upsetting friends who rely upon my web server. So that’s another place where I do not want to wait a long time for disk scanning to complete. Even with journalling, you will occasionally need to do a full fsck on the drive. That takes a significant amount of time on a 1 or 1.5 T drive.

But hey, if it isn’t important to you, then OK. it’s not important to you. I might not agree, but I don’t recall anyone suggesting that we had to have a consensus on all issues.

By: BDP

BDP — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:02:58 +0000

A faster boot time would be nice because I have to reboot my computer with Ubuntu fairly often. Something happens which causes the display to get scrambled and the only way I know to fix it is to turn off the computer. This usually happens when I’m trying to do some work so its really annoying.

By: Scott Ritchie

Scott Ritchie — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:30:40 +0000

There is little difference between 2 and 4 minute boot times, but there’s a world of difference between 1, 3, 10, and 30 seconds. Once you get low enough, it changes the way you use the computer.