OMG it's fast! Why?

[lemming465]

9.10 has more aggressive use of upstart than 9.04 did, so you may be getting better parallism and fewer unnecessary timeout delays during the boot process. Also, 9.10 defaults to ext4 filesystem; if you were comparing it to 9.04 on ext3 that may also have made a difference.

[GGreen]

I agree on the speed. The desktop that I installed on has 256 ram and 40 gig hard drive. The computer is 5 or 6 years old and was sloooooow with XP. It is surprising how fast it is online too.

My only beef is that XP was completely wiped out on install and it won't boot unless I use Super Grub Disk for Grub2.

I've upgraded my laptop from Vista to Ubuntu, my dad's desktop from XP to Ubuntu and a friend's brand new laptop from Vista to Ubuntu. My wife is next...if I can ever get her off the computer.

[CardPlay3r]

no antivirus, anti spam, anti trojan, anti malware, crud to eat up cpu cycles


this is one reason, theres plenty more

Just wanted to say...how did you figure out spam was OS related?

[phillw]

no antivirus, anti spam, anti trojan, anti malware, crud to eat up cpu cycles


this is one reason, theres plenty more

::cries::

Has ClamAV running on my mail server, along with SpamAssassin ....

LOL

With a my full lamp installation and mail-server booting to log-in screen and onto my desktop (Yeah, I have the full GUI on my machine !!) In about a minute on a laptop with a celeron M 440, 1GB RAM - I'd say it's a bit fast - still beats the windows XP machine sat next to me !!!



Yay, guyz & galz in development - I take hat off to you !!!

Phill.

[chiwi]

I had Ubuntu 9.04 and recently updated to 9.10 Beta, but I have not seen any boot-timing improvement at all.

I've read that ext4 and grub2 are only installed on fresh systems, not in upgrades. Does this have something to do with the boot time improvement?

This is running on a relatively new computer, Core2Duo and 4gb Ram.

[lemming465]

Grub2 no, since not much time is spent in the boot loader before the kernel initializes.

Ext4 maybe, but you wouldn't see the real benefit unless you installed from scratch on a freshly formatted filesystem.

Most of the work is in reduced device delays and application improvements (kernel, upstart, X, ...).

[chiwi]

is ext4 that fast? should I consider backing up several GB of Music/movies/pictures in order to install everything from scratch ?

how much faster is it ? 10% ?.....40% ?

[SuperSonic4]

Not really

[lemming465]

In general ext4 performs about the same or slightly faster than ext3, but your mileage may vary. A fresh ubuntu install onto a newly formatted ext4 filesystem will probably install slightly faster than onto ext3 (5%?) and might boot slightly faster (3%?), but won't be noticably different for light use like web browsing.

* mount time options matter; write performance of ext4 with barriers on by default will be slower than ext3 with barriers off by default

* in response to ext4 R&D, recent Linux kernels are changing ext3 more than you'd expect; if distributions change their ext3 mount parameters in response, next years ext3 benchmarks won't match this years

* usage matters. A fresh ext4 filesystem allocates inodes that are twice as big as ext3. If you use ACL's a lot (Samba server with windows domain clients?) or SeLinux labels (redhat enterprise?), the improved locality of reference in ext4 will give a noticable performance boost to some workloads. Extent based allocation means than ext4 deletes large files very much faster than ext3; if you are working with video editing this might matter.

In disk benchmarks and in parallel programming, there are very few universal performance wins: it almost always matters deeply what the usage pattern is. E.g. read-heavy disk workloads do fine on RAID-5 layouts, but write heavy workloads suffer a 4x penalty. If you have a write-heavy database workload your design response is to double the cost of the redundant disk system and use striped mirrors (RAID 1/0) instead.

If you like to keep up with the Jones, use ext4 - it's newer and shinier. If you need to work with large files regularly, where large is from 500MB to any number of terabytes, definitely use ext4 over ext3. Otherwise flip a coin.

[Tomatosoup]

It does certainly boot fast, Karmic Koala with a fresh ext4 partition.