Improve (potentially halve) login time by using readahead

[Falcorian]

Thanks for the guide! Before and after (of course) I'm ~40 seconds GRUB to GDM. But before it was about 10 seconds for GDM to desktop, now it's ~2!

[Mr. Picklesworth]

Just want to throw in my thanks here. This had an amazing impact on my boot time. All that loading seems to have disappeared into the aether
Logging in is literally an instand process.

It would be pretty cool to see this sort of functionality implemented in the default GUI, perhaps a "preload desktop for x user", or "preload y session" option under the Login administration...

A few things:

* Doing this messed up Beagle, which is understandable; it complained about index files being loaded wrong. I disabled Beagle and ran readahead-watch again, which seemed to solve the issue. After turning Beagle back on, I am not noticing any significant loss.

* This line confused me: "If you have home on a different partition as root, you should repeat Part 1 for each partition, replacing gnome.root with a different name, and replacing the mountpoint / with each interested mountpoint." Yes, my /home is a partition of its own, so I ran readahead-watch a second time creating a file called gnome.home (hah, it tickles!) for /home. However, I was rather unsure of this... is that what you are telling me to do? I think what got me confused was that I should "repeat Part 1 for each partition"; as far as I am aware, /home can only be one partition. (Unless the user's home folder is multiple partitions, which would be plain nasty). Do you mean to say that step 1 should be repeated for any seperate permanent partitions on / if they exist? Why doesn't readahead-list cope with these mounted partitions itself?

* Has anyone noticed oddities with Network Manager? I haven't done a huge ammount here yet, but I noticed that NM had actually not logged in to my network immediately. It never does that; the thing generally has a way of reading my mind and being connected to the Internet before I even think about it. Could just be a side-effect of the login process being so fast that I see the applet before it's ready. (Thing is, though, I manually told it to connect).


Does or can Readahead deal with files that are being loaded in patterns from particular directories? For example, I believe Tomboy will go through all of the notes in my .tomboy directory. Will readahead only remember to preload those ones that Tomboy loaded when I got it to watch activity, or is it clever enough to think "read everything in .tomboy"?

[hihihi]

xubuntu hardy 8.04 64bit
great job.
i also have /home as an own partition.
i did as jdong suggested.
it is working really good.
i do not use beagle, i find it a problematic peace of software.
i use tracker instead and there are no issues.
all in all,
very cool.
promp-time is being used usefully.
super again great how to and thanks.

[picpak]

This actually slowed things down. My startup used to be 40 seconds, now it's 50. Oh well.

[Flag]

Thanks for all this, but how can I check if my files are loaded ?
Ububuntu 8.04 64 bits fresh install, Acer Aspire 7520.
Files in home/.readahead, merged home and root folder.
I don't see any improvement, from grub to gui 60 secs.,I read some of you do this in much less time, I'm jealous.

rgds

[run1206]

i slowed down prior to the login (1:05 to 1:50) but after login is almost instant
i guess i could work on sys-rc-conf for before the login...thanks

[macvr]

wow works....
reduced my start up time by 25 secs!

[AndEat]

I tried this on Hardy_64

it worked well, but I could not connect to the internet at all

Network Manager showed 'no active device' and could not bring the networking down or up manually

Removing everything and rebooting, was slower but had no issues with networking.

I am trying again and will see if this repeats

[lifestream]

... Went from 65 seconds to 40-45! Thank you so much *thumbs up!*

[jdong]

Two points of note:

(1) This procedure can in no way damage your system or change its behavior other than making startup take longer or shorter. It simply modifies a list of files that are read the first thing during bootup. If you're having weird networkmanager problems or something like that, it's extremely unlikely to be caused by this.

(2) In Intrepid, there is a new tweak to the default readahead lists in that they removed all the kernel modules from the readahead list (i.e. files ending in .ko) which is supposed to improve bootup speed -- rarely are all the kernel modules required during bootup, but they are all touched a little bit by udev. If you try filtering out *.ko, it might improve boot speed a bit too.