Ubuntu Breezy boots slowly compared to Mandriva 2006.0

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

(I'm not sure where to file this so I've gone with boot)

I noticed with just feeling that Mandriva seemd to boot and finish bringing up the GNOME clock faster than Ubuntu Breezy. To this end I timed using a stopwatch the time it took both to boot.

Mandriva seemed to take 53 seconds and Ubuntu (after a fresh install with updates, near enough untouched profile) took 1:21 (so my gut feeling was right - Ubuntu finished almost 30 seconds later).

Figuring that it was due to Mandriva starting less initscripts I disabled the bits I did not need (bluez, evms, hplip, lvm, mdadm, mdadm-raid, pcmcia, powernowd, ppp). This saved a couple of seconds but nothing major.

Wondering whether it was because the Mandriva kernel was pentium optimised I switched to a k7 kernel in Ubuntu. This brought the stopwatch time down to 1:15 which is still 20 seconds slower than Mandriva.

I also used bootchart in an attempt to help better identify where the speed gains can be picked up. I shall attach the various boot charts that I have to this bug.

I hope that somehow Mandriva's speed ups can be cherry picked into Ubuntu because the difference is dramatic.

(related to this Wiki topic - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FasterBoot )

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

The bootchart for Mandriva. Total time is 34 seconds.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Bootchart for a new Breezy install with all updates applied. Set to automatically log in as a user with a near enough empty profile.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Forgot to mention that the total time is 1 minute 10 seconds.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

As "Bootchart for a new Ubuntu install" but with the following services turned off:

bluez, evms, hplip, lvm, mdadm, mdadm-raid, pcmcia, powernowd, ppp

Total time is 1 minute 1 second.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

As "Bootchart for Ubuntu with less services" but running a k7 rather than an i386 kernel. Total time is 55 seconds.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

http://hwdb.ubuntu.com/?xml=03b5dcb9c42e73627c4f413c2e5f84f2

[Hidde Brugmans (hcbrugmans-deactivatedaccount)]

Among several specifications dealing with the boot process is this spec:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StreamlinedBoot

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

Any updates on current dapper with clean install? Would show how far Ubuntu is (or is it?) still behind Mandriva. There have been both boot and Gnome login performance improvements.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

If only installing Ubuntu were less painful...

Thanks to the way Ubuntu deals with it's grub I absolutely loathe installing it side by side with existing Linux installs. It's also hard to know how much I'm helping - this bug has sat unconfirmed for a long time so I don't think I'm actually adding anything useful to Ubuntu here...

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

I wonder if anyone (me) can change this to "confirmed". Because it's clear that the report states the truth - more stuff may still be done to make the boot faster.

I guess stating a package name would be useful, so I chose initscripts for now.

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

So please, S.W., if you can, do the tests again so that there would be meaningful data about where Ubuntu currently is vs. eg. Mandriva. Or someone else. I agree that it's unfortunate that Ubuntu's installer doesn't detect all the other distributions, though if you overwrite your previous grub it's quite easy to do chroot /media/otherpartition ; grub-install hd0 to get back using the previous configuration. It's also easy to then add ubuntu entry to that other partition's /boot/grub/menu.lst

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

Assigning to scott, who is behind this Streamlined Boot Sequence -specification, from which to this bug is linked. He can probably either keep it or think about someone else who's working on the boot speed.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Hello Timo,

"I agree that it's unfortunate that Ubuntu's installer doesn't detect all the other distributions"

That's not the problem (Ubuntu leaves the entries made by other distros alone which is excellent). The problem is that Ubuntu detects all the linux images in /boot and throws away its existing entry for booting itself and adds LOTS of entries for booting itself with lots of incorrect Linux images. I only want one or two entries for booting Ubuntu and I want those to be for correct images that are actually installed/updated. Each time this happens I have edit the command line parameters of the booting grub to get the system to go and then hand edit menu.lst to contain the right entries so they stick which is immensely frustrating.

However, since you have jumped through the hoops to have this bug confirmed, I shall jump through the hoops to satisfy your request.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Could you please stop adding noise to this bug report?

File another bug and keep the discussion there.

FYI I haven't had any problems using different distros together with Ubuntu. Just add your entries below the MAGIC section in menu.lst.

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

I don't use Mandriva 2006 but Dapper seems to me 3X faster to boot than Breezy.

Can you try with a Dapper Flight install ?

Also, I'm not sure if this bug must be keeped open. There are already a bunch of people working on this problem.

Feel free to add your bootcharts here :
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootCharting

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

I've no bootcharts, but a year-old Pentium M 1.6GHz laptop, 5400 rpm hdd, 512MB RAM was used for the following timings.
* Breezy:
grub to gdm: 71s
(gdm to desktop: 30s)
* Dapper Feb 14th:
grub to gdm: 50s
(gdm to desktop: 25s)

The original bug report and the bootcharts are a bit confusing - which are the timings to actually compare, there's quite a different trend between the boot charts and the timings reported in the bug description? The boot charts' times favor Mandriva more.

But if taking the timings from the bootcharts (mandriva 34s, ubuntu breezy 70s) and seeing the difference in favor of Mandriva in those, ie. ~50%, it would seem like Dapper is not yet near Mandriva - currently ca. 30% improvement over Breezy. It might be different on a non-laptop (read: faster hard drive), but 3X faster sounds like very unbeliavable difference unless something was more like broken in breezy for the configuration.

As a sidenote, Gnome startup time was a disappointment, as it doesn't seem to have improved much despite all the talk that's been going on about it.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

OK. It's taken me around 8-10 hours of dowloading burning and (re)installing but I have bootcharts for several distros now. The bootcharts say nothing of the time it takes to have a desktop after the display manager is started but I do have stopwatch timings of how long it took the clock applet to display itself. These results cannot be compared to the originals because they were done using a different disk drive that could be reformatted between installs.

The results can be seen on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootCharting#head-dca0372aa8fd490a9717ad0c72c9b400c236a581

Summary:
Ubuntu dapper flight 3 is just as fast as Mandriva 2006.1 to get to the desktop. OpenSUSE 10.1b3 and Fedora FC5t3 are both noticiblely slower. Different distros start different services and Fedora no longer seem to be pursuing early gdm login.

One interesting thing that did emerge is that if you have a disk with a lot of partitions your boot can be slowed down significantly (10s of seconds). This appears to be down to hal automouting all the extra partitions. OpenSUSE was especially vulnerable to this.

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

Your bootcharts are helpful, thanks; in that case I shall mark this bug fixed -- there are actually some more speed improvements coming this week hopefully, but only in the order of a handful of seconds.