booting up speed

Im creating this thread for two reasons.

1). Im really upset with my average loading time from cold boot.
2). Im curious to see what your machine can do.

I've timed three things that I see essential to getting into a desktop enviorment. Cold boot to Prompt, Login time and, kde loading time (via startx).

Im running a AMD K6-2 300mhz machine with 128 megs of ram with a 6 gig seagate ata33. Heres my timing.

1). Cold boot to Login prompt (via runlevel 3)

54seconds. (4-5 for bios)

2). Login delay. Typing in user name and passowrd, waiting for prompt

takes me 7 seconds. (WHY!!!???)

3). KDE3 via startx

takes me 55 seconds.


So, 54/7/55 (116 seconds total) is terrible in my opinion. Windows from cold boot takes 28 seconds to get desktop. HOW can I improve speed?

Whats your average?

Ben.

Well Ben I have been doing things to improve my boot time on my linux box MP3 player in my truck. I now have it down to a 15 second boot!!! That includes the 3 seconds it takes for the BIOS. I have disabled EVERYTHING at boot (cron etc) and have no getty, just boots right into my MP3 program (all thanks to everyone who has helped me on here).

On my desktop in my Computer room, I have a 90 second(or so) boot. I brought the time down on that by running an interactive boot, and disabling many of things that auto run at boot time. That along with the reconfigured kernel (made a lot of modules out of things that used to be built in) and now it's screamin!

Winbloze does still boot up faster according to your numbers, but I think of it as a nice cup of Joe... You can have a cup of coffee right now, or you can have a cup of coffee right, whichever you prefer.

Oh also, the BIOS on my Home PC runs the boot a lot faster (around 2 seconds) so that also may tweakable for you.

excellent. thank you for your input. I have disabled nearly everything that shows up in 'services' on the mandrake control panel, including sound and alsa. I forget where all the bootup services are defined, could you help direct me?

I think my 486 machine boots faster then that (don't have exact timings though). I assume you've got a standard installation of mandrake running on that machine. Well one of the things that makes Mandrake so easy to use is that it is able to detect a lot of things automatically and sets up a lot for you. A lot of this detecting is done at every boot. And besides all that there are a lot of extra processes which are probably started that you might not need. One good thing is to go through all the boot scripts in /etc/rc.d and find out exactly what's happening at boot. And then turning the stuff off which you don't need. Might be confusing if you aren't all to familiar with linux though. But www.linuxdoc.org contains a howto which describes what happens from boot up to bash prompt. Maybe a good thing to read which will help you speed up a lot of things.

thats right, the rc.d thank you. I'll look into it. Like the coffee analogy MasterC.

rc.d help -----------------------

each dir under rc.d corasponds to it's runlevel correct?

rc3.d would be the dir of contents i need to modify if im booting up into prompt (3) correct?

other ------------------------------

also, what causes me to have a 7 second lag with loging in? I type user name, then password, then a 7 second stall. what gives?

only start the services u really need

on my system (PIII 450 with 256MB ram, LFS, automatic login in KDE(objprelinked) with KDM) it takes 39 seconds from lilo to a fully loaded KDE3

Yes everything in the rc3.d directory would get run when entering runlevel 3. But when you startup everything in the rcS.d directory will also get run. These are usually all links to the scripts in the init.d directory though.

About your login being delayed. It's probably something like trying to log a hostname which it can't resolve. Or it's something weird in your .profile or .bashrc files which it's trying to do which could take a while.

This document should explain quite a bit:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/From-PowerUp-T...mpt-HOWTO.html