init observations

[Stephen J. Smoogen]

On 11/16/05, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> Dimi Paun (dimi at lattica.com) said:
> > This is offtopic, but I think in general we have a problem
> > with startup times. For example, starting gedit (which is
> > marketed as a fast and simple text editor) on my fairly
> > decent 3GHz CPU/1GB RAM box takes a *few* seconds. This
> > should be instantaneous (<300ms). I think we're about 100
> > slower then we should be. And this is in an area that people
> > care about startup times more than for boot. I wouldn't
> > be surprised to have similar inefficiencies during init.
>
> Disk seek.

To elaborate.. there are factors beyond your CPU/memory. What kind of
diskdrive do you have? What is its transfer rates? What are it
hit/miss rates? How is the layout of the disk optimized for disk-seek?

A lot of commodity disk-drives are sub-par on these areas. This means
that programs will slow down because you are spending a lot of time
waiting for the disk-drive to give you bits because it keeps plugging
up its cache or not able to get various items off disk as fast as
advertised.

--
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator