Arch Linux

mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,360

lvm2-monitor and packagekit causing slow boot time

On a laptop which was previously booting acceptably fast, in  recent days has been booting very slowly.  I ran the boot analysis:

$ sudo systemd-analyze blame
6.216s packagekit.service
5.664s lvm2-monitor.service
4.532s initrd-switch-root.service
3.694s cups.service
3.016s ldconfig.service
2.744s systemd-logind.service
2.507s systemd-hwdb-update.service

Has anyone else seen packagekit and lvm2-monitor services causing slow boot times?  There were threads from a couple of years ago where people had problems with lvm2-monitor, and if lvm was not being used, masking that service helped boot times improve (and shutdown times too).

Is anyone doing this now after seeing this issue re-emerge?  Also does anyone else see issues with packagekit being slow?

Edit: I masked the lvm2-monitor service and the boot time is significantly improved:

$ sudo systemd-analyze blame
1.722s cups.service
 941ms initrd-switch-root.service
 586ms systemd-journal-flush.service
 529ms systemd-udevd.service
 364ms packagekit.service

Edit 2:

I also found posts that suggested that pacman 6 possibly causes some issues with packagekit,  so I followed a suggestion to do:

$ sudo rm -fr /var/lib/PackageKit/alpm
$ sudo systemctl restart packagekit

The shutdown time was taking over a minute prior to this, but seems to be improved after cleaning up the packagekit alpm directory.  If anyone else has found similar issues and has any workaround to clean things up it would be useful to know about how it was done. These issues have occurred on two old laptops but not on  a relatively new laptop, so possibly some old files from previous versions of packages may have  been underlying these issues.

Edit 3: It looks like packagekit is a dead project - do we need it at all?

Last edited by mcloaked (2021-07-18 15:44:07)

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Mike C

twelveeighty

Member

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,456

Re: lvm2-monitor and packagekit causing slow boot time

Edit 3: It looks like packagekit is a dead project - do we need it at all?

I don't have it, and there's not anything exciting that requires it either: see https://archlinux.org/packages/communit … ackagekit/, so I'm thinking something *used* to require it, or you explicitly installed it.

Last edited by twelveeighty (2021-07-18 16:30:56)

mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,360

Re: lvm2-monitor and packagekit causing slow boot time

It seems that the discover facility to check for package updates within plasma needs it - but I never found discover useful for me as I just use pacman - so I removed the three packagekit packages I had installed - and the system seems happy with them gone. Within the plasma desktop trying to use discover now complains it needs packagekit but since I won't use it now, that doesn't matter.

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Mike C