What *is* a good boot time? (What's yours?)

NathanUp@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 4 points –

I've been working on my boot time lately, but I realize I really don't have a good handle on what it should be. I am hoping some of you will share yours so we can all get a feel for it. I'm including some HW specs here also because I've heard it can be relevant:

64GB RAM, 2 x 2 TB NVME:

Startup finished in 9.922s (firmware) + 1.151s (loader) + 3.506s (kernel) + 4.006s (userspace) = 18.586s graphical.target reached after 4.003s in userspace.

Edited to add boot time detail

20

It does not matter unless you reboot your machine every hour.

Literally don't personally care about boot time, as long as it's under 30-60s (currently at about ~5?), and since I reboot like once a month, I don't really pay much attention to it. How come you want to minimize that so much? Any particular target you want to achieve?

I really just wanted to get a gauge on what a good range is. For my machine, I just want to see how low I can get it without sacrificing needed features or maintainability. 10s would be amazing.

  1. a few minutes. Usually I expect 2, claim 5, but when updating gitlab or something equally bloated I'll need 7-10 for the patch-and-bounce.

  2. no one cares whether it takes a minute extra while you're getting coffee or when it's in the middle of the night. The #1 selling feature of systemd is thus moot and it's truly just a piece of hot garbage.

# systemd-analyze time

Startup finished in 39.050s (firmware) + 6.680s (loader) + 993ms (kernel) + 3.519s (initrd) + 22.326s (userspace) = 1min 12.570s 
graphical.target reached after 21.680s in userspace.

for me, most time is used until the bootloader shows up, because I had to disable "fast boot" in bios because it made some problems on rebooting. pressing enter in grub could speed up 5 seconds more ;-) gentoo, systemd, 2x2tb nvme, 32 gb ram, 4 hdds. could be faster, but it mostly doesn't matter because I power on the system every morning but don't use it right away

edit: on my server, which is not UEFI, therefore has no "firmware" part:

# systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 1.814s (kernel) + 47.640s (initrd) + 36.602s (userspace) = 1min 26.057s 
graphical.target reached after 36.602s in userspace.

and on my laptop, which boots fast AF

# systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 4.242s (firmware) + 14.631s (loader) + 1.737s (kernel) + 3.210s (initrd) + 5.136s (userspace) = 28.959s 
graphical.target reached after 4.936s in userspace.

That seems like a lot of time in firmware! The laptop time is amazing though.

Last time I rebooted the laptop it was about 30 seconds... six months ago.

Seriously guys, why the boot time that important nowadays ?

My server takes about a minute but it's a dual core Atom with 1.8gb of ram >_<

About twenty seconds from 'power button' to 'desktop' on my laptop, about two minutes on my desktop, mainly because it's got about 9 disks in it in various RAID patterns, and a discrete graphics card and fancy USB audio and all that shit needs initialised. Doesn't matter much, they both sleep / hibernate and rarely need restarted

Interesting - I also have a discrete GPU and a USB interface. Do these things add much time?

We're talking seconds, but on top of 'twenty seconds' then it's a large fraction of the total. The real problem is mounting disks in RAID for me, though - takes quite a while.