Certification System 201011-6750 boots 6 seconds slower

[Brian Murray]

During QA review of bootchart data provided by the Hardware Certification team
it was determined that certification system 201011-6750 boots 6 seconds slower with
a Natty image from 20110314 than with a Natty image from 20110311.

System url:
 https://certification.canonical.com/hardware/201011-6750
Detailed Results:
 http://people.canonical.com/~brian/daily-bootcharts/201011-6750.html

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The plumbing layer appears to have taken 3 seconds more than the last install and boot.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Additionally this system is not running Unity and the desktop time increased nearly 2 seconds.

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

I noticed /etc/update-motd.d/98-reboot-required was ran and some additional calls to 'sh' and 'sysctl'. Could we get another run to see if this was a single anomaly?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

There's no single thing that stands out to me in the plumbing layer; everything just generally seems to be taking that little bit longer. I suspect that differences in individual small processes like sh and sysctl that show up in the bootchart is that they just happen to be over bootchart's threshold for paying attention.

One thing I do notice is that I/O is much spikier during ureadahead. Is the ureadahead profile up to date? You can force this by running:

  rm -f /var/lib/ureadahead/pack /var/lib/ureadahead/*.pack

(*.pack may not exist - don't worry about that) then reboot, leave it up for a minute or so after boot to give it time to prepare the profile, and then run bootchart on the following run.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Daniel - could you perform the test that Colin is asking for? Thanks!

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Hi all,

Bootchart data is collected weekly with an image from that same week, so sadly we no longer have the troublesome image from 20110314 to test.

We do have a couple of recent runs with an image from 20110321, that could be useful to see if boot times are still slower.

The first submission was run right after installation:

https://certification.canonical.com/hardware/201011-6750/submission/qNfPddoCZG5uQi4

For the second, I updated the ureadahead profile as Colin asked, then rebooted to collect updated bootchart data:

https://certification.canonical.com/hardware/201011-6750/submission/2gJPv3672uidEvS

Bootchart data can be retrieved from the "attachments" link in each submission.

Please let me know if more data is needed or there are problems retrieving this.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Looking at the latest results for this system using an image form 20110328.1 we can see that the plumbing layer has decreased in time to 10.03 seconds which is very close to the 9.33 seconds for Maverick.