How do I improve boot speed?

Question

I have seen many videos that make Ubuntu faster, but only makes the desktop faster. I am looking to make my computer boot faster. Is their anything i can do to make Ubuntu boot significantly faster?

Answer 1

Generally, the less programs you have loading on bootup, the faster your system should be. Try BUM (from software center) to disable some unneeded services, and also ensure you don't have any unnecessary programs installed that will be loaded when booting. Finally, using a solid state drive (SSD) as your boot device should significantly improve bootime.

Oh one more thing, your filesystem type makes a difference as well. EXT4 has suffered some performance regressions (according to phoronix) but I've still found EXT4 to be great for booting fast.

Answer 2

Switch from a magnetic drive to a Solid State Drive, or a Magnetic & Solid State Hybrid drive. That will make any OS boot a lot faster. Hybrid drives are not that much more expensive. If you don't want to go that far, then just get a 7200 or 10K RPM hard drive.

Answer 3

I assume you're talking about Ubuntu 11.04?
I have been trying this for a pretty long time now, without much succes. Anyway, these steps made a few seconds difference:

1. Removing unneeded packages

apt-get purge brltty brltty-x11 foo2zjs min12xxw ttf-indic-fonts-core ttf-kacst-one ttf-khmeros-core ttf-lao ttf-punjabi-fonts ttf-unfonts-core

2. Using both cores/CPU's during the boot process

ONLY DO THIS IF YOU ARE SURE YOUR COMPUTER HAS MULTIPLE CPU'S/CORES!
Open /etc/init.d/rc (you'll need root privileges) and replace CONCURRENCY=none by CONCURRENCY=shell. Then save the file.

3. Disabling unneeded daemons

This is a bit more advanced, so best not to do it if you don't know what this means. Install bum, and start it with root privileges. Then just untick the boxes in front of the daemons you are sure you don't need. For instance, when you don't have a scanner, you can disable saned. And if you never use bluetooth, you can disable bluetooth as well.
When you're done, hit the Apply button and click either yes or no (it doesn't matter much).

After completing these steps, reboot twice. FOr some reason the first reboot after changing all these options takes much longer than the other ones, but you should notice some difference during the second reboot.

Answer 4

How do I improve boot speed? already gives some directions. You can also have a look at this page: http://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/12/speed-up-your-ubuntu-machines-boot-time/

Answer 5

Use bootchart to produce detailed graphs of what takes time during boot. It might help in deciding what to tweak or remove. From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootCharting :

• Install the bootchart and pybootchartgui packages, either through apt-get or Synaptic
• Reboot your machine
• The bootchart is in /var/log/bootchart as a .png file

Answer 6

I just ran across this the other day. Its "e4rat" Instructions Here

This little app is amazing.

I took an overtired single processor AMD sempron running at 2800+ which normaly boots Natty at 1.45 mins to 27.885 secs.

I have the boot-charts to prove it. Its crazy!

Answer 7

How to make Ubuntu 10.10/10.04 boot faster

Answer 8

Replace your hard disk with a SSD is probably the only practical method. Example:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/17/samsungs-6gbps-ssd-gets-a-consumer-label-october-ship-date/

The time does sound a little excessive but you haven't posted any details.

Answer 9

This article touches on multiple ways to make your machine boot faster.

Proceed with CAUTION.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=387

Answer 10

My machine booted WAY faster if I did an alternate install and added the GUI packages manually. Of course, it just strips out things I don't need that I am capable of adding myself. If you are going to come back with "how do I compile/install X,Y, and Z apps" this might not be a good idea.

Answer 11

Garbagecollector is right. Proceed with caution. But some of the programs you can safely disable are email popping utilities such as Evolution, especially if you are not using Evolution at first. Also, anything related to printing can be disabled if you do not print at all. Same for Wireless if you are wired.

Answer 12

For anybody else struggling with this, just install BUM (sudo apt-get install bum) and start it s a root user. Then un check the service you want (I disabled Apache2, PostGreSQL daemon, MySQL, virtual box et al) and it will be a bit faster. You can enable it back anytime if you do not delete!

Answer 13

Try editing the "/etc/default/grub" file, like most blogs are pointing at. You probably know that one. First adding word "profile", then rebooting, then removing "profile" then rebooting again... it really does improve boot speed. Here is one example: http://lgjsheron.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/how-to-speed-up-boot-of-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx/

Answer 14

Ingredients:

• Get a UEFI system with bloat free UEFI code
• Get a SSD
• Install Ubuntu in UEFI mode
• Bonus: Compress initramfs with xz and only include the modules needed. (You should really know what you're doing before attempting to do that.)
• Bonus: Remove unnecessary daemons or configure them to start up faster. Though the default install is already good enough.

I have to say 32 seconds is actually good enough. It won't get much faster with traditional hardware. My new Lenovo T530 takes the same amount of time to boot in legacy mode. With the new micro SSD I recently installed and Ubuntu in UEFI mode it is down to 15 seconds from pressing the power button to login. It still feels like it is wasting 5 seconds during post, but it is absolutely not wasting time starting the actual operating system. The micro SSD has transfer speeds of 280 MB/s, may be a 500 MB/s SSD might make it to 7 seconds. But it is really up to manufacturers to reduce pre OS boot time (POST and what not).

Regarding boot profiling and shell concurrency. Those information can be seen as dated or eventually myth. I remember that automatic boot profiling or something that made boot profiling absolutely superfluous was added to Linux or the core system years ago, since then I didn't used boot profiling anymore after a new kernel package was installed. The shell concurrency setting was said to break things, but with Systemd and Upstart it should be superfluous too, and should have no positive effect.