Improve (potentially halve) login time by using readahead

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JSorrell

Your guide didn't halve my login time. It eliminated it almost entirely. I went from upwards of 10 seconds or more to roughly one second. This is with 2 gigs of RAM.

Absolutely fantastic.

---

What version of Ubuntu do you use?

Hakimio, you might just be starting up way too many things at startup for this hack to work for you.... it seems to be loading Firefox, Switfox, Skype, etc etc etc.

Good evening.

Gutsy: boottime from GRUB showing 0 seconds up to the startup sound inside GNOME ending: 43 seconds.

BRB after doing these changes.

argh. it'll take a bit longer. I don't seem to have a working tty1 :X wtf.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by jdong

Hakimio, you might just be starting up way too many things at startup for this hack to work for you.... it seems to be loading Firefox, Switfox, Skype, etc etc etc.

---

The thing is, I don't start anything except gnome :/ Can it be related to preloader? BTW, does it go to the background instantly after issueing sudo readahead-watch -o ~/.readahead/gnome.root / for you? For me it waits few minutes while my hdd is working and only then goes to the background...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hakimio

What version of Ubuntu do you use?

---

7.10

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rinzwind

argh. it'll take a bit longer. I don't seem to have a working tty1 :X wtf.

---

Offtopic, but... I guess you are experiencing this bug.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hakimio

Offtopic, but... I guess you are experiencing this bug.

---

Yes I allready found that on these forums :) But I can't remember why I put vga=791 inside that (it was to fix something :P )

But I did all above and it is not much: 42 seconds :(

The gnome.root has the following:

Quote:

---

/lib/ld-2.6.1.so
/lib/libncurses.so.5.6
/lib/libpam.so.0.81.6
/lib/security/pam_unix.so
/lib/terminfo/l/linux
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.6.1.so
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl-2.6.1.so
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnsl-2.6.1.so
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_compat-2.6.1.so
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_files-2.6.1.so
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_nis-2.6.1.so
/etc/group
/etc/ld.so.cache
/etc/shadow
/etc/locale.alias
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/sudoers
/etc/pam.d/common-auth
/etc/pam.d/sudo
/etc/localtime
/usr/lib/gconv/gconv-modules.cache
/bin/more
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_ADDRESS
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_COLLATE
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_CTYPE
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_IDENTIFICATION
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_MEASUREMENT
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_MONETARY
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_NAME
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_NUMERIC
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_PAPER
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_TELEPHONE
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_TIME
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/SYS_LC_MESSAGES

---

Should that be more?
Cuz these are all very small fries :)


I think I did it wrong. I killed it before logging in.
(can you say OOPS).

Brb gonna do it again :D

41 seconds :P

gnome.root has 1418 files but not alot of improvement is speed :(

Pity :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hakimio

The thing is, I don't start anything except gnome :/ Can it be related to preloader? BTW, does it go to the background instantly after issueing sudo readahead-watch -o ~/.readahead/gnome.root / for you? For me it waits few minutes while my hdd is working and only then goes to the background...

---

This will indeed conflict with preload -- preload must be correlating your login with launching your favorite apps, which is why it's prefetching so much.

It is supposed to take a few minutes before it goes into the background.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by jdong

This will indeed conflict with preload -- preload must be correlating your login with launching your favorite apps, which is why it's prefetching so much.

---

Yup, preload was causing this. I think you should definitely write about this issue in the "how to".
Anyway, readahead trick didn't really help, but removing preload (stupid thing - not gonna use it ever again) reduced my login time by 5 seconds, it now takes ~5 seconds and I don't see any side effects of not having preload.