Originally Posted by
DuckHook
That's a pretty snazzy box you have that booted so quickly. Have you measured it in older HW?
AMD FX 8320 @4.2GHz, 8GB DDR3-1066 CL7 RAM and a 120GB Kingston SSDNow V300+, it's a budget build. I did measure it on older hardware (Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 @2.92GHz, 2GB DDR2-800 CL6 @1066GHz, same SSD and OS) and the result is 6 seconds. Not a 6 seconds difference, a 6 seconds boot time. The biggest time-consuming task drive seek time, the transfer time of an SSD is quite high (it was connected to a SATA II controller), and boot doesn't really need that much processing power at all on a standard PC.
Originally Posted by
DuckHook
I believe that Linux boot processes will take advantage of multi-threading, so 8 threads will boot up much faster than 2.
Yes, Linux features parallel boot (insserv) which allows using makefile-style boot sequence, that way it'll boot faster by using multiple cores for initializing services. It's enabled out-of-the-box on Ubuntu. If it isn't, running the following will configure it:
Code:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure insserv
I personally can't see the use for it, difference between parallel boot and single-core boot on a standard system is marginal, the biggest performance impact is dealt by the storage drive.
By the way, those 14 seconds OP mentioned is incredibly slow for an SSD, especially one like the Samsung 840 Pro since it has an even faster seek time than my V300+. On my PC, Debian boots in 14 seconds, but it has /var and /home located on a SATA II hard drive so it takes time to load user configuration and stuff, and Debian's initscripts is slower than upstart on Ubuntu. Ubuntu also has only one 66GB partition located on the SSD, so there is no HDD seek time bottleneck, which is the reason it boots in 5s. Plus, my SSD is a SandForce and it suffers a performance penalty with TRIM, it would be faster if I were to disable it (~230-270MB/s with TRIM enabled, ~320-380MB/s with TRIM disabled).
Originally Posted by
DuckHook
Windows was always dead last by a large margin.
Have you tried benching Win8? From what I understand, that thing uses some kind of hybrid boot which uses hibernation to boot faster. Don't know how that one would compare against Linux and OS X, my guess is that it would either be slower or on-par, judging by it's HDD boot time and processing power dependency (Windows is different than Linux, it relies heavily on both CPU power and storage speed).
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