I was just curious to see what everyone's bootup time is on their Linux/Unix computers.

On my FreeBSD 5.2.1 machine, it takes about 35 seconds to go from the boot loader to the login screen. I've found that FreeBSD tends to boot faster on my computer than Linux or Windows, but tell me about your experiences with different OSes.

I've got an AMD XP 2200 with 512MB RAM and a 40GB 5400RPM hdd.

80 to 90 seconds. I dont know why, Ive got a fast system and have eliminated lost of processes, I do have 3 or 4 error messages at boot but they are just things that dont really affect much. KDE does take forever to load even with 512 MB of ram.

And this is from pushing the Power Button to a login prompt, note only the first two are desktops and I don't boot into X, but I'm running Gnome on the P4 and it takes about 8 seconds after "startx" and the PIII 866Mhz I'm running Fluxbox and it takes about another 3 seconds to load it.

P4 2.0Ghz 512MB RAM - Under 20 Seconds (Desktop)
PIII 866Mhz 768MB RAM - 21 Seconds (Desktop)
Duron 800Mhz 768MB RAM - 28 Seconds (Loads Apache and MySQL, Mailserver, NFS, etc)
Celeron 900Mhz 512MB RAM - 24 Seconds (Fileserver, NFS, vsftpd, Samba)
Pentium 233Mhz 128MB RAM - 29 Seconds (Suprisingly Fast and Minimal Install, DMZ type host to login with SSH to access home network)

All running Slackware.
Desktops and Celeron 900Mhz are Slackware 10, Duron is Slackware 9.0 but now Slackware-Current, Pentium 233Mhz is Slackware 9.1 (minimal install I got down to about 300 Megs on original install)

Cheers!

Same PC; 500MHz Celeron; 256MB RAM; from Lilo (about 30 seconds from hardware and RAM check to Lilo);

Debian Woody = 45 seconds to GUI login
Slackware 10.0 = 35 seconds to text login
Suse 9.1 = 80 seconds to GUI login
FreeBSD = 25 seconds to text login (plus BSD boot manager)
Solaris = 80 seconds to GUI login (plus Solaris bootmanager, plus 1 or 2 five second countdowns)
Window 98 = 25 seconds to network login

So what do I mark on the survey?

Slack 10
Duron 750
40 sec to text login
30 more from startx to KDE splash disappearing on the desktop

hotplug and ldconfig account for 10 seconds combined of the initial 40.
MySQL and NFS auto-mounts are negligible.

I'm not booting my server

45-50 seconds for the notebook from
Power-Button including BIOS password
and xdm login into Flux :} if I don't add
any parms to the lilo-commandline.
p4-1.8, 512M Slack 10

[edit1]
52s for the the Dual-PIII with 512M from
power-button to kdm login.
Slack 10, mounting nfs shares from two
other machines...
[/edit1]

Cheers,
Tink

Pentium III 600 mhz

75 seconds from power button to text login
35 seconds from login to kde desktop

If you have multiple systems or multiple OSes, fill in the poll for the *nix system that boots the fastest from the bootloader (after the delay, of course) till the login screen (text or gui).

arch linux, 30 seconds from BIOS beep to login. slackware used to take a bit longer, maybe 40-45 seconds, i would guess.


> oh, from the bootloader? sorry didn't notice that. i timed it again, 23 seconds, but that is an athlon XP at 2.2ghz. how are you getting such fast speeds trickykid, on PIII, duron, celeron, etc.? do you have ldconfig turned off at boot? that's what seems to take the longest for me, with dhcp sometimes also taking a few seconds.

trickykid, how do you have such fast bootups (with the time it takes from power on to bootloader added on as well!)? Before I recently started playing with FreeBSD I had Slack 10 on my computer and had pretty slow bootups. I guess I could've gone crazy with the kernel and had it much faster, but other than recompiling the kernel, what other options are there for booting faster?

To M$ Win#$%! or linux?

YES YES YES, I know I should not be swearing on a public forum

on your *nix machine

From "boot loader to the login screen" 1:23 - that's no good! The darkside
can do it in < 30 secs. :/

Recompiled the 2.4.26 kernel with no modules except soundcore, so I expect
it to be slower than the stock kernel (55 secs.)

I know hotplug and ldconfig take forever - and since I have all usb devices built-in,
do I need hotplug?

Slackware 10.0
kernel 2.4.26
P4 2.4 Ghz 533MHz FSB
(2) 2 Kingston 512 MB DDR333
(2) Maxtor 60GB ATA133 7200RPM (running at UDMA 5 because of mobo)

But my question is this: how often do you reboot?

I shut down every day because my computer is in my room and I can't sleep with all the fan noise and LEDs. So boot time doesn't really matter if your computer is on all the time, but for me, it's nice to have it start up quickly since I have to do it sort of often.

If this were asked in a Windows forum, there would be a ton of answers, because they've gotta restart every frickin' time they install something! Oh well, even if you don't bootup every day, boot time is still a sort of good measure of how fast your hardware is and how stripped you have your kernel (which translates into more RAM - yay!).

I agree. This is a bit pointless. Who cares so long as your stable and everything works as advertised. The one exception would be with notebooks that one would normally be shutting down and booting up often. A long boot on a notebook can be annoying and may be worth some tweeking. It still is far less important than a stable machine.

I mean I spend more than 40 seconds staring off into space - if I time it with my boot-up I'll be increasing my efficiency right?