Update: Matt’s bootchart available now available !
Google’s evangelist Matt Cutts just gifted himself with a new SSD drive for his laptop. Since Jaunty is told to be fast at booting, he adjusted Grub to have a 0 second timeout, Gnome to use auto-login and automatically start Firefox.
(also note: he didn’t installed Jaunty from scratch. He installed Ubuntu from a 8.10 cd, then upgraded to 9.04 – that likely means he’s using ext3)
Let’s see how fast he can get to the interwebs – everything included (bios, grub, etc)
- 0:00:00 – pressing the power button.
- 0:00:05 – BIOS loaded (wonder if this can be adjusted to be shorter on some computers)
- 0:00:08 grub loaded and started the OS loading process
- 0:00:15 usplash disappears, auto-login starts (amazing)
- 0:00:21 the top gnome panel appears (still has to load icons)
- 0:00:22.5 firefox displayed. Google search shows. Life is good !
Matt talks about 17.5 seconds to boot, but he speaks as a real world measurement, grub, gnome login and firefox included. Clearly, the measurements we usually find in the internet are taken from the grub selection screen (so when grub is already loaded) to the ubuntu login prompt. Looking at the video, I’d say with such measuring method, Ubuntu booting is a little less than 10 seconds.
Some people posted on this blog asking for a bootchart. It would be interesting to have, I’ll post it if he provide it.
Reading from an RSS ? Check out this awesome video here !
Update: on readers request, Matt installed bootchart and profiled his boot. Also, he reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 from scratch using Ext4. Ext4 shaves slightly less than 1 second from the boot on SSD (note: many sources around the net claim the difference is around 2-3 seconds on traditional hard drives).
Take a look to the ext3 bootchart (8.67 seconds). For the ext4 bootchart, look below: 7.83 seconds.
Matt Cutts Ubuntu 9.04+Ext4+SSD bootchart, click to enlargeSource: read the original post. (at the time of publishing, his site is down)
Wow! Just getting to the login screen and not counting GRUB on Jaunty takes me 35 seconds. SSDs must be pretty amazing. Did he time Intrepid too? Is Jaunty faster or slower than Intrepid on that hardware? For me, Jaunty is much, much slower (but I’m not using SSD).
that is freaking fast!!
Wicked! Life is BETTER!
Well, he’s not really an Ubuntu freak, more like a tech-savy casual user. Given the fact that he did install Intrepid first and later update to Jaunty, I’m sure he would have said if Intrepid was faster.
I also put Jaunty on a macbook, and feels pretty faster than Intrepid.
I really think Jaunty being slow on your pc it’s not normal and may be an issue. But keep in mind you may have many services installed. Obviously quite every benchmark you see on the net is about a clean installation, instead.
Hi All,
That was indeed fast – I’ll wait a month after the release go do the install.
I copied my package list from Hardy, did a clean Intrepid install, added those packages back, then dist-upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty. Hardy = 22s. Jaunty = 35-37s to reach kdm.
Hi All,
9.04 can’t be that fast on my notebook.
I’ve been looking to change back, but am still not convinced.
I didn’t try Intrepid on my SSD to see how fast it was. I’ve already got Intrepid running on a different desktop machine and I wanted to try something new. I love that the boot time is so short that my bootchart PNG truncates some of the processes.