I’m wondering why my opensuse installation on laptop boots so slowly. According to bootchart it takes 70s to boot opensuse and show login screen.
Comparing this result to Vista SP1 which needs 44s to boot including typing my password, openSUSE looks miserably slow. People say that Vista is slow, then how this situation can be called?
Boot times are completely irrelevant - Vista has a thing called Delayed Service Startup where it starts loading certain services AFTER the desktop is visible (and thus making everything grind to a halt for a while) whereas your Linux box starts all the services before the desktop is visible.
You can always disable un-needed services and speed up the startup. Search the forums for a guide.
I know that in theory Vista delays loading of services but I can hardly notice any slowness of my desktop right after it’s visible. Moreover, there is no disk activity after my desktop shows up so I guess services are not loaded.
Also, what I would like to emphasize is disk utilization. I don’t know how to express my observation using precise words but I have a feeling that when openSUSE boots disk goes like a crazy seeking all over the place for data. Thus disk generates lots of noise.
Again, Vista seems to be better optimized because it feels like it’s loading data in one go, from one place so disk doesn’t waste time for seeking for a data.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m using openSUSE since 10.3 as my primary OS but I wonder how it can be improved. And response like “go and search how to tweak your services and then tweak them” is far from being satisfying because openSUSE isn’t addressed to hackers only.
What I would like to see is answer to two of my questions:
Is my bootchart showing that I have too many services enabled. If so, which are the most time-consuming to load?
Can be done anything with disk utilization? Can we do something so disk can read data sequentially? After all, most of the data is read on every boot.
I would like to gather some data and transform it into bug report the same way as I did when facing other weak spots in openSUSE.
As far as I understand my chart it’s showing time until kdm appears. So you claim that you have half of my time using two years old laptop? Do I understand you correctly?
Yes!
And this is an (almost) default openSUSE 11.1 install. OK, I have 2GB of ram and a dual core processor (two years ago it was an amazing laptop), but openSUSE 11.1 boot in half the time used by my previous distro, fedora 8.
I have similar hardware. Dual core Intel CPU + 2gb of RAM. This must indicate that my installation is somewhat screwed but I cannot figure out what’s wrong with it. Any help greatly appreciated.
wow, you peeps have fast machines but long boot times? O.o
My main desktop is a singel-core Athlon 64 4000+ with 2 GB of mem (and old IDE disk) and my boot time is ~37 seconds (right after grub till login display)
There is no bug, it’s just the list of services being startup. I can assure you that I don’t have this on my laptop. I only activated those services I need and it’s a lot, and it boots pretty fast without the hard disk utilization.
Your hard disk utilization is caused by beagle, it’s an issue so old as the street and know for several version now.
You need to disable or uninstall beagle of you don’t need it and you no longer suffer the disk issue. I never installed beagle since it came out and never had the hard disk issue.
