Extremely long boot time

[feffer]

Besides, dmesg another simple thing to try is disable the boot splash screen so that the boot text can be seen. On new machines, this normally scrolls by VERY quickly, so if it hangs somewhere that may be a problem area.

I think there are some simple ways to disable the splash screen, but I do it through a custom grub entry which is a bit more involved.

feffer

[blacksilva]

thanks feffer. mine hung from a couple seconds in to around 15-17 seconds. Which turns out that when it hung was when it was searching for the floppy drive. O and i never had a splash.

O and just curious. Is your name F'er?

[lmintnewb]

Thought to add summin,

But originally was like he's using lmde, not Mint 10 main ... like I am. So thought it wouldn't apply. Then realized lmde still has gnome with the Mint magic tools added to it. So perhaps the layout is basically the same. In the control center in gnome Mint 10. There's a menu item called startup applications ( I believe ). You might want to click on that and uncheck some of what's starting when you bootup too. On top of whatever you got rid of with bum.

Wondering if I could get some benefit out of getting rid of this powernowd package too ? Though this comp is a dinosaur ... Like 8 to 10yrs old or so. Could one of the experienced guys in the thread clarify for me ... advisable on this comp too ? Thanks for all the tips again RR & H, every lil bit helps at this stage of the game. Glad ya got it pepped up some blacksilva.

[blacksilva]

Yeah i have already been in the startup applications. thanks though.

[lmintnewb]

Hey blacksilva found summin ya might like.

One obsessive software tweaker to another. Thought I'd letcha know about summin I came across today. Talking about the swappiness thing. Might not improve boottime so much. But is supposed to improve general performance and on a system with more than enough RAM ... like yours. Setting it to summin like 10 surely wouldn't hurt regardless.

Or even 0 ... but might just be me ... I prefer a safety net and scuttlebutt around the web seemed to advise that vm.swappiness=10 was about right for desktops. Without further ado ...

http://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxt ... o-high:-Ub

Actually did this myself of course. Before advising anyone else to and it works as described. Bunch of people in the forums mentioned adjusting swappiness from the default of 60. But their instructions are really vague as to where to add the code or how to. Also what they described didn't work. I tried adding what they said, where they said and nuttin. The procedure outlined in the linux article in that link works.

note though: In relation to editing your sysctl.config file. With this ... in mine there was already a hash mark (#) at the bottom. So I didn't have to add another.

# <This was already there at the bottom of the file.
# Decrease swap usage to a workable level
vm.swappiness=10
^ So I only had to add these two lines to the bottom of the file, hit save and reboot.

When I run the terminal command to check my swappiness value. ( below )

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness


It comes back as 10 now, like it's supposed to . I doubt adding an extra # ( hash tag ) would matter either way. Just making sure people know how to do this with their comps, if they come across the thread.

[blacksilva]

alright thanks a lot mint newb. ill be sure to check that out.

[kwevej]

This will speed up the booting for sure:

Code: Select all

apt install readahead-fedora 

[lmintnewb]

Looked cool ... didn't install it as this box is not RAM rich. Also note this thread, though not sure if it's still valid. But it seemed to suggest that app has issues with ext4 formatting and works more with ext2 and ext3 type. Which many folks, includ the OP more than likely are using ext4 w their comps.

http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/inde ... ahead.html


Could always remove it later or whenever they want though I guess. If it doesn't work out for any particular persons system. That info in the link I found could also be outdated. The software mightve been updated since or summin. Kwevej, are you using it yourself and if so is your system ext4 ? Also what kind of RAM have you found to be the cut off for this app being useful ?

My comp is RAM deprived, cause I'm too lazy to install another chip.

Anything that speeds up the OS sounds good within reason though. Gets this mental image of people sitting at their comps with a stop watch checking their boot times, lol. Screaming, ha !!! 40.4 secs !!! In your face all you slow loaders of this world !

[kwevej]

the box doesn't need to be rich in RAM - it doesn't eat any extra memory for system usage
The readahead affects only boot-up time - actually it starts after kernel init, and halts when boot-up is finished.
The trick is, that it loads data into memory while hardware is detected, so when needed later during the boot, they are already fetched into mem.

I personally use the readahead with ext4. No problems at all.
Just try it and you'll see.

It needs one extra reboot prior normal read-ahead operation (the first reboot after installation is used for statistics generation / i.e. making the readahead strategy)

[lmintnewb]

That link I put up now notice was from 2007, shrugs.

I've already done the profiling thing in grub. Was supposed to speed things up. Everything went ok, but changed it back probably before getting any benefit, if any benefit were to be had. Don't need the readahead thing, I'm content to wait a whole 40 secs for the computer to boot-up, lol.

If I want it to be up and running any faster. Would just set it to suspend or leave it running all the time. Thanks for mentioning it though. Could help some folks out. This threads turned into a lil bit of a Mint tweaker guide. Would be nice if folks who try it post back with success or fail reports.

[blacksilva]

This will speed up the booting for sure:

Code: Select all

apt install readahead-fedora 

thanks for that advice but i have switched over to opensuse and cant find it. but im pretty satisfied with the 28 seconds it takes opensuse with kde to boot anyways