Speeding up the debian/etch boot, a short report

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,
Ok, my bootchart experiments didn't work out too well...
My first run was over 3 minutes to boot. Because I had all kinds of
scripts and packages installed I never use... And I use suspend2, so I
rarely ever boot my system...
A quick removal of those I don't use brought the boot time down to 59
seconds, with readahead from Ubuntu. But there is some really weird
stuff going on...
e.g. the first 7 seconds, there is no process listed at all.
Experiments with my own init gave very mixed results. The best result
was with two readaheads enabled (I hadn't removed the one from
ubuntu), the worst with only one.
It just doesn't make any sense.

In one case I see a bootchartd zombie hanging around some time during
boot, and a gunzip zombie. Both in the phase where I just execute
rcS.d scripts like sysvinit (which btw takes 36 seconds of my boot
process, so there is probably a lot to gain there, too)
Then it never notices my "enitdir" process, which manages my runlevel.
Granted, it takes next to no CPU time, but still should show up...
Anyway, my charts are pretty useless I think, because the system is
optimized in no way (e.g. by starting mysql, apache, postfix way after
gdm) and because I run way to much stuff on my laptop. I should clean
that up first.

After disabling readahead, I have one clear observation to make:
logging into my account takes a lot longer. There preloading
definitely helps!

best regards,
Erich Schubert
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