I did some performace tuning today on my laptop, so i can make Kubuntu start up faster. It was mostly about disabling startup services I don't need and optimizing KDE startup performace according to the performace tips from wiki.kde.org. I did not tried to use the patched fontconfig or do something like that. I just have the standard kubuntu debs installed. The system was prelinked, but it was before I even started to optimize it, so it is not really relevant.
I will not go into the details, but here are some figures. The laptop is a PIII-500Mhz (actually this is written on the box, but every application, including the POST screen says it's a 550Mhz one), 192MB SDRAM 100Mhz (261MB/s), 6GB disk, Trident video adapter, 15" monitor, working in 16bit colors. hdparm -t /dev/hda shows 13.22 MB/s. Not too much...
- Before optimizing: around 3 minutes (2:58 or something like that, I did not write down)
- After optimizing: 2:01, from which 1:21 until KDM was usable. The rest is me typing the password until KDE become functional (kicker and its applets appeared, K Menu was usable).
As you can see I meassured together the startup of the Linux system and the login inside KDE, as after all I'm interested about the time I have to wait until I can use the desktop.
The speedup is impressive, I would say: ~33%. I don't know if the 40s KDE login can be reduced further or not, but it might be that I did not applied everything.
For what it matters I meassured the startup of my desktop system, which is way faster: AMD64 3200+ (slightly overcloked to around 3500+), 1GB dual-channel DDR 400Mhz (1957MB/s), 40GB disk (39.23MB/s), Nvidia Geforce FX5500 and X working in 24bits. Here I meassured a Windows XP and a SuSE 10.0 startup with SuSE's KDM, but my self-compiled KDE with debug info enabled:
- Windows XP: 39s (I had to type the password here as well)
- SuSE: 47s until KDM, 1:31 in total.
The surprise for me is that from KDM to my KDE session it took 44 seconds. What I can think of is that
- I have a non-optimized debug build: bigger files, slower reading from disk, non-optimized code
- I have more fonts
- The session restoration is activated and it might have started to do the restoration before kicker and the applets were loaded.
- I did not do anything described in the performace tips
From this the 47s is hard to reduce as I already have disabled all the startup services I don't need. Still SuSE does some things I cannot disable without rebuilding a kernel, like detecting RAID arrays.
UPDATE: I tried with another user, where the standard SuSE KDE 3.5 is started and there is no session restoration: KDM appeared in 50s (I think the 3s difference was due to a CD spin-up), total time was 1:10s. So logging in took 20s, which is less than half compared to what I got first time...
Conclusion? My conclusion is that if you are bothered with long startup times, there IS room to improve the situation. I will try at my father's PC as well. Your conclusion can be something else...
Links:
(no, on the laptop acpi is not disabled).
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Try the SLICK version of Suse 10.0
It cut down my KDE start up time by 1/2 over standard SUSE.
On an older AMD based system ( older than yours), I get mandrake 2006 to boot in 20-25 secs and KDE starts up in 8 sec the first time after boot.
You need a hard driver with 8MB cache, 7200 RPM at least. On your system, ultrascsi might be really fast.