Has anyone used ureadahead, readahead, e4rat, or anything else to speed the boot process in Debian or any Debian.based distro? It takes anywhere from 50 to 70+ seconds to get from the grub menu to the login manager, and another 20 to 30+ seconds to get to the desktop. Google chrome takes several seconds to load the first time in a session, but that is still much faster than Google chrome in W7. I am dual booting W7 and lmde4.

obviously that depends on the hardware. And you can use systemd-analyze to check your boot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDuQ...l=SethJennings
https://www.tecmint.com/systemd-anal...p-performance/

The highlighted sentence makes me believe that your hardware is not adequate to comfortably handle a modern web browser.
The software you mentioned - I think readahead is just part fo the kernel, I can't find ureadahead anywhere, and I have never used e4rat. I am under the impression that this functionality is being handled by the kernel & the init process.
I appreciate that you have a problem, though - I just don't think this is the way to solve it.

In any case, more info we need.

i like to use systemd-analyze with the " plot " option to make a *.svg image of the boot process
this way i can see it in detail and figure out what is taking way to long

Thanks, it'll be a bit before I can post as requested as I have only intermittant access to the computer in question.

If you have two or more hard drives installed then you can speed up Debian a lot by splitting it across both (or all) drives. I generally put / and /usr on different drives. If you have a third drive then put your user data on that drive.

The basic idea is to have as many drives busy in parallel as possible.

I have also posted in the forum on th Linux Mint website. My machine is a laptop so multiple drives is not an option. Detailed info on my machine is posted there:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtop...bf48d#p2158254

As to the handling of Google Chrome, LMDE handles it much faster than W7, especially from a cold boot. In that case, W7 may take over a minute to open the browser the first time in the session not including a web page, where LMDE only takes about 4 seconds. Subsequent opening of the browser is far faster than the first in W7. LMDE is a little faster in subsequent opening than the first, but then how much faster could it get? Page loading is also faster in LMDE than in W7.

I think that's the maximum fastness right there, for this particular hardware.
Please refer to my previous post, and the implied question(s) you chose to ignore.

yes, you cannot do significant changes, but you can obviously try to remove unnecessary services. Adding RAM is a good idea, but will not help on the boot time (but on browsing).
The only way to speed it up is a new SSD (as far as I see).
You wrote it:

In most cases, upgrading the RAM helps improve the performance massively. I would recommend upgrading to the max allowed (by the system and the budget).

I didn't know this tool existed and I love it. I was able to plot the boot process and get details about how quickly the system is booting up. Thanks for sharing.

This is the hard drive you currently have:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SpinP.../dp/B002YZDV5A

and it's a 5400rpm drive. You would be much better off spending money on a new SSD drive rather than a ram upgrade.

That is symptomatic of a slow hard drive as is the slow boot time. The first load up of chrome has to come off the hard drive where it is loaded into ram and run. After closing chrome, it stays in ram for some time unless some other program needs the ram. The second load up of chrome will come off that ram cache and will be much faster.

You may want to run Samsung's hard drive diagnostic utility on the drive to make sure its functioning properly. You can download it here:

https://www.lifewire.com/samsung-hutil-review-2624563

I will try that the next chance I get, thanks.

To Ondoho : Sorry if it seemed like I was ignoring the request for more info. I am infrequently able use the machine in question and do most posting from my cell phone. I did post info in a forum on the Linux Mint website and linked to that in an earlier post. As far as software loading time is concerned, it is quite acceptable in LMDE, but it can be abysmal in W7.

I recently upgrade my laptops old hdd to ssd the difference is night and day. upgrading ram will help but not as much as a ssd will.

I did the same in January and that made all the difference in the world. My wife says it is the best thing I've given her. I also maxed out the memory to 8 gigs, but that has made little or no difference. Might extend the life of the ssd by reducing unnecessary writes to cache.