Why does 11.04 boot so slow on my system?

Question

I downloaded Ubuntu 11.04 and it was working fine until I started tweaking compiz and rebooted. It took 3 to 4 minutes to boot up. When I press enter at the boot menu, there is a black screen with something flickering on the top left corner, which is normal, but for me the black screen stays for 4 to 5 mins. It is driving me crazy. Please explain your answer as I am not the terminal stuff.

Answer 1

you can try to trace down the issue by installing bootchart available in repos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootchart

Answer 2

I'm on 11.10 with nvidia-current drivers. From my boot chart I've found out that booting into Unity 3D lasted 1:12.98 min while booting into Unity 2D took 0:38.66 min.

So I decided to look if some processes related to nVidia differ in both boots. And indeed I found out that nvidia-settings process was mentioned proc_ps.log in such proportion:

• 66 times for Unity 3D and
• 21 times for Unity 2D.

That lead me to conclusion that disabling nvidia-settings may improve boot performance. So I did sudo chmod a-x /usr/bin/nvidia-settings and the next boot in Unity 3D took the same 37 seconds (0:37.76) as with Unity 2D.

For sure it is not the solution, but at least a direction to look.

Hope this helps.

P.S. Make sure you know what are you doing while dealing with system files.