boot performance

[Christoph Wickert]

I know, there 've been lots of postings about the performance of 
servern. I think the performance in general is ok (even OO compared to 
M$ Office). My question is about booting:

When RH8 was released, for me here in Germany it was unusable because of 
buggy utf8. After testing it I switched back to 7.3 and was happy. When 
RH9 came out I gave it a try, but I still was not setisfied (for other 
reasons, e. g. crippled KDE) and turned to Debian.

First thing I noticed was, my box (Athlon XP2000, 512 MB) was booting 
MUCH faster:
* Booting Debian Woody takes less than 27 secs (from selecing "Linux" in 
Lilo to the login screen). The new 2.4.22 kernel is a little bit slower, 
say 29 secs.
* Booting RH (all releases I know from 6.1) took at least 40 secs, kudzu 
always turned off. Severn is 54 with rhgb, without maybe 50.

Why is my machine booting twice as fast with Debian? Even when I turn on 
nearly all services (mysql, http, bind...) it's still at least 20 secs 
faster than severn. Ok, the sendmail thing has already been mentioned 
(and I think, a smaller/faster mta will work fpr most people), but this 
cannot be the only reason.

Christoph

P. S.: Performance in shutting down is the same :-)