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My home folder is 109 GB and I as wondering if this would affect startup performance and performance in general?

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  • If you want to see what's happening during startup and how long each step is taking you can type this into Terminal once booted: $ sudo systemd-analyze blame
    – Broadsworde
    Nov 8, 2019 at 13:16

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During boot your /home partition is mounted which takes a fraction of a second regardless of it's size.

After logging in there are programs which will index (or process) the files in your home partition. This will effect performance the first time the program is used. If properly designed, such programs should not lag your screen or keyboard. After files are indexed the first time, subsequent program usage will only incrementally update new files added.

Some example programs would be:

With a large home directory some commands will be slower such as find but the similar command locate will not be noticeably slower. find searches every file but locate has an index of every file stored in it's own database.

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  • That's answered my question. It occurred to me while I was waiting for an answer to simply work it out, so if my calculations are correct, my /home partition is 916Gb, systemd-analyze blame tells me my entire /home partition (916GB) took 25.115 seconds to load, so if I divide the time to load by the total size in GB of my /home partition, it took 0.027467249 per GB to load and if i multiply that by space used on my /home folder (109 GB) it took 2.98857532751092 seconds to load my /home folder.
    – user993560
    Nov 12, 2019 at 20:30
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The size of your home folder, and of your connected drives in general, will generally not affect general performance. In theory, a larger drive could require some more time for checking, which would affect startup times. However, with journaling filesystems, such as the default filesystem ext4, this is not of any practical concern.

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