Mandriva Cooker (2009 Spring) boot times

Source

Fred looked into bootchart and discovered the Cooker package is just broken, and suggested I use the 2009.0 one for now, while he fixes Cooker. So I did, and here's the results. What Fred calls 'perceived boot time' - time to GDM up and running - is 0:17: bootchart. What Fred calls 'real boot time' - time to console login being available, i.e. all startup processes have finished - is 0:21: bootchart. Interestingly, I had to disable ntpd to get that reading. With ntpd enabled, real boot time is 0:27. I think it's because this system uses wireless, so ntpd doesn't successfully come up until the network connection is done (takes five seconds or so).

The installer guys claim to have fixed the ext4 issue, so I should be able to do an install to ext4 now and test with that - should be interesting. Obviously, I'll be doing a parallel install this time!

Comments

fcrozat wrote on 2009-01-16 21:12:
Hmm, you don't need two different bootcharts to measure "perceived" vs "real boot" times. Usually, you read the same bootchart, but perceived is the time where gdmgreeter starts and real is the time given by bootchart. For ntpd, this is because ntpd initscript has a dependency on network being up.
adamw wrote on 2009-01-16 21:16:
Well, true, I just figured it was pretty easy to run two tests and the graphs would look cleaner :)
ghmitch wrote on 2009-02-02 05:12:
My personal opinion from observation is that the way ntpd is implemented in Mandriva in terms of bootup is just lame. It seems to be scheduled to start BEFORE the network gets starts and just spins away time trying to initialize. I have found it a pain for a long time, but have been too busy (or probably just too lazy) to go in and modify its inittab order to something more sane and see if that helps. There are probably others aware of the problem, but it also probably has a priority of about zilch. Its just SO Linux. Only Linux users understand these things. And by the way, congratulations Adam on your new assignment! I was saddened to see you leave Mandriva, you were so helpful to all of us over the years, but Red Hat is a great company and change can be a great thing when we accept it with enthusiasm. Life is an adventure! I wish you the very best! - George