Readahead should start in the background

[kiddion]

Binary package hint: readahead

For some people, including me, using "readahead" as it is, slows down boottime instead of speeding it up. It helped a great deal to start the readahead-list binary using --background instead, which makes more sense anyway.

Of course, for a "profile" run, the readahead-watch program should not be started in the background!

Also there is some ugly scriptcode used in the readahead/readahead-desktop scripts, which does not make sense:
----
if /sbin/start-stop-daemon [snip]
then
     log_end_msg 0
else
    log_end_msg $?
fi
----

This suffices:
----
/sbin/start-stop-daemon [snip]
log_end_msg $?
----

[kiddion (kiddion)]

Hmm, seems the contrary of:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/readahead-list/+bug/59716

However, booting with readahead in the foreground (thus stalling the bootprocess), my bootime in edgy is roughly 55 seconds, while it is 47 seconds when readahead is started in the background...

And a lot of people at http://www.ubuntuforums.org don't benefit from readahead in the foreground. It seems illogical that readahead can be faster in the foreground - reading ahead large files like all python libraries implicitly used by hplip/kde-guidence and all fonts loaded by X before continuing the bootprocess.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

Rationale was provided for the change to foreground.

Please provide equal or more research

[Egon Alter (egon-alter)]

attached are some bootcharts for
 released version of readahead (27 seconds)
 + background (22 seconds / 19 % faster)
 + ionice -c3 (21 seconds / another 3 % faster)

[David Gaarenstroom (david-gaarenstroom)]

Interesting... Too bad ionice is in /usr/bin which automatically qualifies it as unusable... (/usr may not be mounted yet)