Ubuntu and Mint both boot faster than Slackware if anyone cares.

I'm tired of making my Slackware boot faster as every time there is an update on current that modifies the rc.* files, I keep on restoring my old setting. I just turn it on then leave, then come back later when it done booting.

I rewrote some of the scripts so they run on ash. There is a little improvenment in performance, but not as much as just having what you don´t need disabled or taking away some code you don´t need to interpretate. Saddly, some script use bashisms and would require more work to be rewritten - work which requires time that I don´t have.

And yes, Debian boots faster because it paralelizates. You can tweak Slackware so it runs more than one process at once by modifying the scripts. Ok, it won´t be stelar but it will save you a second or two.

Really, if you work 8 hours on your computer and your booting time is 1 minute then that is 0.2% of your working time. Who cares about that? If it bothers you use hibernate or suspend-to-RAM. It is much more important that you have a stable OS (so that you don't have to reboot) All of them, Slackware, CentOS and Debian should be doing that job. Then just disable the daemons you don't need and the differences in performance should be not significant among the distros.

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Of course, boot time is not all important, but I'd rather it be faster than slower as long as it doesn't impact the system in a negative way.

If speed were everything to me I'd be using Gentoo or something.

Thanks for all the feedback from you guys. I learned a lot,especially the rc.M and rc.local file modifications.

It's quite true that as long as the operating systems is stable,it doesn't matter how long the startup time is.But I bet that you wouldn't tolerate such thing happened in Windows because it's way too slow!;-)

Anyway,I just can't get away from slackware!

One of my favorite parts of a fresh slackware install is making it boot faster, bit by bit. I always time the boot as I tweak away. A default install takes about ~29-40 seconds to boot. Recompiling the kernel saves about 3 seconds off that. Editing the rc.S and removing all the daemon tests saves about 5 seconds. That puts you at around 20 seconds. Editing rc.M takes quite a bit more off that, usually 8 or 9 seconds. After a bit of work, I can get the boot time down to ~12-14 seconds, and thats after recompiling the kernel, getting rid of an initrd, and extensive editing of the startup scripts and a rework of rc.modules. I didnt think about parallelizing the scripts though, I'll have to look into that, I'm always trying to boot faster.

TobiSGD, just because we can be content with a longer boot time doesn't mean that its more or less ideal. I use a laptop and take it everywhere with me. I can use sleep or hibernate to disk, but its also nice to boot in 10 seconds. For many, I think its just something else they can customize with their OS, and its also a fun challenge.

To each his own. I personally don't see the point, I rarely do a normal boot, either I use hibernate or, more often, suspend. Why boot in 10 seconds if the machine can wake up in 2? Of course this is different with mobile machines, my laptop is more a stationary machine, almost always connected to the PSU. I just sold my EeePC 701 (simply to slow) and am searching for a nice little netbook to carry around. If I find a cheap one may be I will have a look into a faster boot, but I think that I will rather use hibernate. Even the old EeePC with its slow SSD woke up in about 25 seconds, including BIOS post and bootloader.

Back in the day boot time was made artificially long to give the IT worker an excuse to leave the desk and have a good cuppa coffee.