Improve (potentially halve) login time by using readahead

[hardran3]

if I use the script "00readahead" provided by Pat Double I get empty ~/.readahead directory.
if I go "by the book (jdong)" I get gnome.root filled.
if I use jdong's recipe and fill the gnome.root, subsequent use of pat's script (with "profile") erases gnome.root and does not create a new one. I get empty .readahead directory.
so, I'm having trouble with pat's script. what am I doing wrong?

I am having the exact same problem. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread. Aside from this one small issue it is great. 35 seconds to desktop on my AA1.

[zika]

I am having the exact same problem. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread. Aside from this one small issue it is great. 35 seconds to desktop on my AA1.

while researching about this problem I've timed my boot-up's and find out that using read-ahead I have boot-up's 10-15 seconds longer than without it. so, I've solved that problem ...
I'm staying with read-ahead that comes with "profile" (when I think about it, I'm not aware of how to disable it now, once I've executed it ...?) on the kernel line (once in a while) and I've (temporarily) removed preload from the picture. that way I have (both read-ahead and preload prevented it) auto log-in and 10-15 second each day to spare ... but it was a nice experiment in which I've learned a lot. thanks.

[zika]

I've been digging today. there is a /etc/readahead directory with two files:

drwxr-xr-x   2 root  4096 2008-10-27 18:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 144 root 12288 2009-01-28 16:54 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root 25727 2009-01-28 10:14 boot
-rw-r--r--   1 root  9998 2008-10-27 13:24 desktop

boot is refreshed today after I added profile in the kernel line. how to refresh desktop? it is being read I guess but it is totally irrelevant to my machine today. it even has a wrong location (London) etc. is this the file we should refresh instead of ~/.readahead/gnome.root?
update: no, I was wrong. desktop is for the case /usr and /var are on different filesystems, if I got it right. sorry.

[Xbehave]

giving this another shot, last time readahead was hurting more than hurting. is there a way to make readahead nice AND ionice.

currently i autologin (but lock the screen) and launch a few apps in kde (.kde/Autostart) im adding this to the post login stuff so my applications launch faster (specifically i greped out firefox and openoffice) afterwards but i still want my desktop to be usable while stuff is being loaded in the background (hence i want to nice and ionice them)

[jdong]

If anything, you want readahead to be ioniced AHEAD of loading the rest of the desktop -- the whole premise of readahead is that random disk seeking reads are several orders of magnitude slower than consecutive disk reads, so you want to anticipate what random-order reads will occur, then do them all at once in sequential order, hoping that this saves you a bunch of seeking.

For this to work, readahead has to be the ONLY process actively accessing the disk during this period. Doing a background readahead along with some other disk-intensive process will make both processes take longer than they would by themselves -- a bad thing to do. This is the exact reason why at startup, readahead blocks the bootup process until it is fully complete.

[Xbehave]

is there a better tool to use to preload stuff to ram after boot then, i read around and readahead is the only* thing i saw that could do it manually for multiple programs.

*well there are some openSuse scripts but the links were dead.

[RainCT]

Thanks for the tip, got it from 40s to below 30s! Now what really annoys me is that the BIOS takes 10 seconds to start up...

[pah99]

Hey I have a question. I am running Jaunty and I started to go through various posts on how to reduce boot time. Anyway, after doing a bunch of stuff, I got it down to 12 something seconds. Then, I ran the "profile" thing for the kernel, and my boot time went up to about 40 seconds. Now, no matter what I do, it stays there. If I shut off readahead, then it goes down to 14.3 seconds, but I cant get it back to 12 seconds. I was wondering, isn't readahead supposed to cut down my boot time? If so, then what is going on? Any help is appreciated.

I have opened a new thread for this at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1100763.

[grindboy]

Did jdong's script on my EEEPC 900 running 9.04 Netbook Remix. I didn't get any dialogue box at the end and I haven't got a ~/.readahead directory! What did I do wrong?

I only did jdong's 4 steps are there things I should have done first?

Many Thanks

[Tom_T]

I added profile to my default entry in my menu.lst and now it takes longer to boot up. Also my desktop seems to take longer to appear..

I've checked the menu.lst and have removed profile.

Before I rebooted with profile I had 2 files in /etc/readahead

boot & desktop

Since I've run with profile they have gone ??
Where these the cache files ??
How do I recreate them ??

Thanks