Arch Linux

duke11235

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Registered: 2009-10-09

Posts: 221

Arch vs Others Boot Time

When I had Fedora 11 on my box, it booted in roughly 15 seconds. I have a Macbook 4.1 Do any recent converts have any knowledge on the difference between fedora 11 and ubuntu boot times in comparison to arch?

Last edited by duke11235 (2009-10-14 04:59:04)

MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

I had Fedora F11 before and converted to Arch. I still have Ubuntu on another computer. My experience - but I don't have exact measures - is, that Ubuntu is the slowest to boot. A comparison between Arch and Fedora largely depends on what you have installed (daemons, etc.). My Arch installation is pretty minimal and has only what I really need, but boot time was pretty much the same as Fedora.
What I consider more important than boot time is the performance during operating the system. With respect to that I found than Arch is faster than both Fedora and Ubuntu.

samjh

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From: Australia

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 34

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Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Ubuntu is now (Jaunty and Karmic) extremely fast to boot.  A non-tweaked fresh installation can be booted up in around 15 seconds.

Arch's boot process tends to be slower, IMHO.  My Arch boot takes around 30 seconds, not including the GRUB count-down.  The biggest delay is waiting for DHCP to kick in.

Last edited by samjh (2009-10-14 13:57:07)

algorythm

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From: /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/FIN

Registered: 2009-07-17

Posts: 181

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

My Arch boots in 15 s, Karmic in 26 and Jaunty in 32..

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neowolf

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From: North Carolina

Registered: 2008-01-27

Posts: 105

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Arch's boot time is really dependent on how you configure your system.  If you have your system to not setup the network connection in the background, it will be the longest step in the boot process easily. Using networkmanager on my laptop though, the only thing that's compared in boot time is Ubuntu 9.10 beta, and even then it seemed slower.

algorythm

Member

From: /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/FIN

Registered: 2009-07-17

Posts: 181

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Yeah, I got a little tweaked Arch.. never booted in 30s though

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“Talent you can bloom. Instinct you can polish.”  — Haikyuu!! (adapted)
“If everybody thought alike, no one would be thinking very much.”  — Walter Lippmann (adapted)
“The important thing is to be able, at any moment, to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”  — Charles Dubois

will1911a1

Member

Registered: 2008-04-20

Posts: 59

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Arch boots in roughly 21 seconds on my desktop and roughly 18 seconds on my laptop.

I tried Win7 recently, but I didn't time it.  It was fairly quick, but not as fast as Arch.

eldragon

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2008-11-18

Posts: 1,029

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

when talking about boot time, you mean the time it takes from power on to login prompt? or is Xorg and the actual loading of the DE included in the measurement? (aka, logged in and ready to use)

Vamp898

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From: 東京

Registered: 2009-01-03

Posts: 907

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Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Arch: http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/3522/bootchartz.png
Gentoo: http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/2799/bootchart1.png

will1911a1

Member

Registered: 2008-04-20

Posts: 59

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

I've always measured it from power on to the login prompt since I don't always use X.  Adding n the time it takes to get to a usable gui is probably nother 5 seconds or so.

Vamp898

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From: 東京

Registered: 2009-01-03

Posts: 907

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Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

i need 19 seconds on Arch and Gentoo until i have a usable GUI

jwcxz

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Registered: 2008-09-23

Posts: 239

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Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

My desktop boots in 18 seconds.  I stuck most of the services to background because they're not needed to proceed.  I didn't make network background, but I have a static IP on this machine so it doesn't matter.  For those with DHCP, if you start the network in the background, it'll probably be up and running by the time you log in.  It's kind of funny/sad that my PC takes longer to POST (about 20 seconds).  I've read that this is a symptom of several EVGA X58 boards.

My laptop also boots in around 16 seconds, mostly because it doesn't have to start very much up.

Last edited by jwcxz (2009-10-14 18:31:08)

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Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,189

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Ubuntu is now (Jaunty and Karmic) extremely fast to boot.  A non-tweaked fresh installation can be booted up in around 15 seconds.

Arch's boot process tends to be slower, IMHO.  My Arch boot takes around 30 seconds, not including the GRUB count-down.  The biggest delay is waiting for DHCP to kick in.

Background your dhcpcd daemon! (and any others you can afford to..)

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Inxsible

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From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

yup. I background everything except syslog-ng

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gog

Member

Registered: 2009-10-13

Posts: 103

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Install an event based init script, like openrc.

You can background networking even if you're using other daemons that'll fail without it (like openntpd or dnsmasq). They'll start once network is up.

duke11235

Member

Registered: 2009-10-09

Posts: 221

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

SoI just install openrc? Is that cli based? What is backgrounding? Is there another way to background processes? Is there anything I shouldn't background?

Surgat_

Member

Registered: 2007-08-08

Posts: 317

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Backgrounding is starting daemons without waiting for the previous one to finish. That can be made by putting an @ before each daemon's name in rc.conf. However, some daemons should be started before some others, such as hal before wicd. This is my DAEMONS array:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal !net-profiles !netfs @crond @wicd @cpufreq @openntpd @alsa)

(daemons prefixed with ! are disabled)

phildg

Member

Registered: 2006-03-10

Posts: 146

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

I get 20 seconds to the gdm login screen from the end of grub's countdown. No daemons are backgrounded and using dhcp, the only thing I did, and it does have a huge impact was to add 'quiet' to my kernel line in menu.lst to stop it being so verbose.

Anikom15

Banned

From: United States

Registered: 2009-04-30

Posts: 836

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Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

I remember Ubuntu took the longest(GDM), but I only had it for a few hours. Debian was pretty fast(GDM). Mandriva was a bit slower than Debian(KDM). Fedora was fast(GDM). SUSE was awfully slow(XDM). Gentoo was the fastest(Nothing), followed closely by Arch(Whatever I'm using at the time-DM).

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Gen2ly

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From: Sevierville, TN

Registered: 2009-03-06

Posts: 1,529

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Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Openrc would not be compatible with Arch's init scripts (or at least it isn't at the time.)  If you want to do openrc you'll need to install baselayout too which probably wouldn't be too tremendous of a task.  For Ubuntu I tried Karmic a few days ago and it booted in what seemed like 10 seconds (no joke) and that was from when I first pushed enter in grub to the desktop loaded.  Arch takes about 15 to get to the KDM display screen on my pc.

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2501

Member

Registered: 2008-05-17

Posts: 15

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

I have a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop with Pentium-M processor. It takes about 24-25 sec to get to the login screen. It is not bad for an old laptop. I recently installed Mandriva Linux and it was taking about 47-50 sec ....!

-2501

Tomone

Member

Registered: 2009-09-29

Posts: 18

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

Wow. I thought my time of 31 seconds (from power on to login) was really fast. After seeing all the times in this thread though, getting that down to 20 seconds seems reasonable.

Acecero

Member

Registered: 2008-06-21

Posts: 1,373

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

With Arch, I get 15 seconds from grub to tty on my Thinkpad x61s. I'm using grub2 and ext4.

RetroX

Member

Registered: 2009-10-17

Posts: 106

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

For me, Arch takes about 15 seconds on a 1GHz Athlon, with an additional 10-30 seconds to gain a network connection with net-profiles.

Ubuntu 9.04 takes about 1 minute to boot, not establishing a connection.  Fedora 10 takes about 1:15, also not establishing a connection (1 minute for Fedora 11).  OpenSUSE 11.1 takes about 1:30-2:00 to boot.

And just for laughs, with Windows 7, I get about 3 minutes for boot time.  Windows 2000 takes 1 minute, and Windows XP takes about two minutes.  Add another 1-3 minutes to that after login if I have any anti-virus software running (otherwise, it's instant).

Last edited by RetroX (2009-10-19 00:58:04)

bharani

Member

From: Karaikudi, India

Registered: 2009-07-12

Posts: 202

Re: Arch vs Others Boot Time

I use conky and i post the uptime shown when conky first loads.
Linux mint 7    ->  44 secs
Arch+ xfce       ->  33 secs
Arch+openbox->   25 Secs
Arch+quick-init->  21 secs.
Quick-init is a fast boot script for arch and its in aur.

My daemons array.
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network @hal @alsa @sensors).

It dont use dhcp.

Last edited by bharani (2009-10-19 01:12:45)

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