Improving boot performance

Posted in: technology. Tagged: linux, grub

One thing you need to know about me is that I am rarely satisfied. For example, my laptop boots up in a very acceptable 25 seconds, but still I am looking for better. So far I have not managed to improve matters, but I did find a great tool for graphing your boot performance, and a very neat way of adding it as a grub boot option, read the following article for how to set this up:

Analyse Boot Speed

Step 1 - Install bootchart

# aptitude install bootchart

Step 2 - Update Grub

# nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

Look for a line that looks like this:

# altoptions=(single-user mode) single

And add a similar line after it that looks like this:

# altoptions=(single-user mode) single
# altoptions=(bootchart) init=/sbin/bootchartd

Then update your grub entries by typing:

# update-grub

Step 3 - Reboot

Reboot, making sure that you select the bootchart option from the grub menu.

Once the boot has finished, open a terminal and type:

$ bootchart

Step 4 - Analyse

You chould find a new png image in your current directory (the one you ran the bootchart command from) called bootchart.png. Open it, analyse it and write a really good howto on how to optimise your system, and then publish it on the web!

Good luck!