Speeding up boot time?

[Chris Smart]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 12:23 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> What are you doing which is taking time? You can put a tool like btime in
> rc.local to show what the system did during boot, in terms of cpu use and
> iowait. Are you mounting filesystems which could be mounted after the login
> prompt is up? Are you doing network operations which could wait? Is your system
> assembling a bunch of software raid arrays?

I think it's generally fast enough, I was just wondering if there are
other tricks. I have played with bootchart to see what's happening -
mostly it seems to be limited by I/O, so maybe time for a new faster
drive.

>
> Do some probing to see if you are doing work which could wait, or if your
> hardware is just not up to the load. Have you tuned your readahead? Tried the
> 'fastboot' option on the kernel command line?

Didn't know about fastboot, thanks and is there a way to reset
readahead, so that it starts again? Over time one adds and removed
services, so that might be worthwhile.

>
> Finally, how often do you boot? How long does your boot take now? How much
> effort is justified in making that faster?

Probably not justified much, but I do turn my machine off every day.

Thanks for your suggestions.

-c