Please share your stats.

[technotorpedo]

While I personally very much like systemd, have long had reservations about what's reported by the systemd-analyze command. it's junk ... here's the output it reports for my old beloved beastie.

[NeddySeagoon]

technotorpedo,

My system is up in about 34 sec. That includes 10 sec zeroing its RAM.
Then, I don't have clutter like an initrd or systemd or even udev.
There is no autoblackmagic of any kind. No cold plugging, no hot plugging, just boot and go.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[technotorpedo]

^ Thanks, sounds like a pretty slick setup. Ah dratz ... no systemd, no systemd-analyze output ! Keep finding myself wondering if it's consistent across systems. For as many Linux users as there are, frustrating how hard it can be to find simple/solid stats to compare. Have had this old thing for quite awhile, planning on keeping until wheels fall off it. If had the know-how and fortitude ( I don't), pretty sure even attempting a Gentoo install would kill my old laptop.

Mind sharing some rough specs for that system NeddySeagoon ?

[NeddySeagoon]

technotorpedo,

Building Gentoo and Installing Gentoo can be separated.
There is no need to build on the system you want to install on.

My wife's E-350 system used to take about two weeks to update running 24/7. That was with help from distcc too.
At the weekend, I cut that to under 12 hours by building the binaries that it would have built for itself on another system, the installing the binaries.
An E-350 is a 10 year old or so AMD CPU. Its a fanless system as its mainly a media player.
To add to the interest, the CPU has a hardware bug, so it can only support one stick of RAM.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[technotorpedo]

^ Yowza ... This workhorse is the only thing onhand here. Have mucho respect for Gentoo, a great wiki/docs + the distro users, seems finding a Linux community where people are really enthusiastic about the platform and knowing their stuff is mostly a thing of the past nowadays. Though glad Linux is reaching people and getting recognized on desktop. Am also pretty set on how Debian operates and a wee bit addicted to all the binary goodies in repositories. Debian gets along well with this old system.

[saellaven]

With openrc and no initrd/initramfs, I have a working system in 15.21 seconds. Add about 10 seconds if you want to count for the time the system POSTs and starts loading the kernel. Startup time includes networking demons (sendmail, samba, nfs, named, sshd, cupds).

3700x with 32 GB RAM with / on a Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB.

Another system with similar specs but a lot more services running takes 23 seconds (clamd being the hog there).

In my case, I virtually never care about startup time. My computers only come down to reboot to a new kernel, to test startup scripts after an update (I used to do the 1000+ days of runtime thing, but if you never check that your system boots properly, you don't know where/when the problem came in), or to add new hardware.
_________________
Ryzen 3700X, Asus Prime X570-Pro, 64 GB DDR4 3200, GeForce GTX 1660 Super
openrc-0.17, ~vanilla-sources, ~nvidia-drivers, ~gcc

[Goverp]

My desktop machine is remarkably consistent:
Power on to Grub boot menu: 15s (i.e. slow BIOS)
Grub boot to SDDM login screen: 15s (this is via OpenRC; no systemd here)
SDDM login to KDE desktop open: 15s

My laptop is faster to the desktop as it has everything on an SSD; the desktop has almost everything except /home on NVMe, but /home is on 5-disk RAID-10, and KDE seems to need time to process all its config files and so on.

AMD ryzen2 processor running at nominal 3.8 GHz. Lots of processors, but startup is mainly sequential stuff, OpenRC parallel start notwithstanding.
_________________
Greybeard

[technotorpedo]

^ Hey thanks saellaven (and Goverp.)

It's the ridiculous discrepancy in reported stats for systemd-analyze vs actually meaningful ones that make me interested in this. Not seeing how/why it wouldn't be consistently off, regardless of hardware specs. For sure agree, not like cold boot-time means much. Though not going to lie either, I do get a perverse pleasure out of being fairly confident could set this antique down next to a much higher spec + MUCH, MUCHHHH more expensive Windows based system and it/Linux would stomp the other guy.

Would like to think in all around performance. Have thought about installing a cheapie SSD in the thing. About the time I did, some major component in it will probably fail anyway !!! Think dust and cat hair is the only thing holding it together.

[technotorpedo]

Also glad the Gentoo community is supporting OpenRC, not anything like an init guru but have looked over the features comparison charts and long came to think of it as the only other serious alternative for conventional form factor Linux (server/desktop.)

[pietinger]

[cboldt]

Anecdotes for you. OpenRC across the board here, but only four machines. Most machines rarely boot, one (traveling laptop) boots more often, sometimes ten times a day, sometimes once each two weeks.

Speed to start is greatly affected by hardware. SSD is remarkably quicker.

None of the machines takes a minute to boot to console. One slow one slowed by clamd, the other by spinning HD. While systemd might give marginally quicker startup, traveling laptop (SSD) goes from cold to full up, 26 windows in FVWM, in about 40 seconds. That's quick enough for me, and I value the plain text logs and other "transparency" items of OpenRC quite highly. I doubt I'd save 10 seconds by going to systemd, and even if it did that, I'd not notice.

I get similar startup time on Thinkpad T420, Thinkpad T450 (two recent incarnations of traveling laptop).

[NeddySeagoon]

pietinger,

[technotorpedo]

[trilithium]

Power on to console login prompt takes 20.8 seconds on my machine (6.5 years old Skylake, 64 GB RAM, SSDs, one old HDD), most of which is spent in unavoidable BIOS initialization tasks. The only systemd part installed here is udev so no systemd-analyze, but according to the log 4.3 seconds of that is kernel initialization. OpenRC services are also started during this time, but I have pruned those down to as few as I can get away with so that does not take more than a second for a typical boot.

Login to X11 with i3wm ready for commands takes 1.5 seconds. This includes various tweaks to customize my environment, background tasks like dbus/pipewire, and one urxvt terminal, but no other applications since I prefer to launch them manually.

[figueroa]

My old machine boots to the lightdm prompt quickly; too quickly for me to have given it a second thought -- should time it. It runs 24/7 and reboots for kernel upgrades, usually every 4-8 weeks; currently stable 5.4 series gentoo-sources.

Power button to GRUB prompt is slow -- maybe 10-15 seconds.
dmesg spans 12 seconds
boot log from mounting /sys to starting local spans 27 seconds

It means something but I'm not sure what. I usually watch the messages on the screen scanning for anomalies.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[spica]

OpenRC here.
According to dmesg output, the last record is wifi connection associated on 16th second.
But somewhere in the middle I unlock LUKS manually.
IMO for a laptop the boot time is not a criteria, because users tend to close the lid instead turning it off, and laptop falls asleep, and then resume happens very quickly, much faster than a cold start.
I reboot it once a week maybe, after the @world update.

[technotorpedo]

Thanks for sharing stats guys. Shouldn't be surprised Openrc is widely used among the Gentoo community. Still concluding that yes, likely times reported by people for systemd-analyze are going to be roughly double, same as for me. Have noted in the past the output will tell me I'm making or losing boot-time but when timed to working desktop nothing changed. It does make me question the value of other information that Systemd tool provides.

Ah .. not like it's a major deal. Only like to gather solid stats when trying to determine if whatever tuning is working. Rather than "it feels faster" yada yada, I want numbers. Crappo ... still have a question mark over this. Will just have to keep it on my list of things that make ya go hmmmm. Thanks again everybody.

[the_actuary]

Using systemd-analyze did not reflect a clear picture for me when I used to run other distros. It underestimated boot times by about 10 secs. I manually timed it instead.

Using openrc + initramfs (needed for luks), and excluding time taken to type in the password for decryption, my laptop & desktop both take about 28 secs to auto log into KDE desktop environment. In another system where I don't have encryption but use openrc, it takes about 20 secs to get into a working xfce environment.

[technotorpedo]

^ Thanks for that too.

Have noticed inconsistencies with the thing(systemd-analyze) still always far off if someone wants to know time to a system they can actually start using. Think of it as mostly gibberish stats and not all that good a metric for trying to gauge how well a system is running. Still use it, cause it gives some numbers. Formerly this old thing was getting like 43secs cold boot to working, though in the interim switched to using wicd-gtk for convenience vs was using networkd + wpasupplicant. The switch added 10-12secs apparently but the stats systemd-analyze was giving has always been badly off in terms of a working system.

Used to custom compile kernels and got some results from that in performance gains (nothing outstanding anyway) but gotten lazy and mostly just been using kernel's from the repo's. Also being a compulsive system-tuner, that added boot-time + whatever extra overhead wicd-gtk + applet is adding is bugging me. Somone knows they probably need to get a life, when they stop watch boot-time like I tend to. Been dorking around with a script + keybind to autoconnect/disconnect my wireless interface. Only haven't gotten a finished/working solution setup yet.

Long meant to mess w Openrc, it's been on the 2do-list quite awhile. Since it's receiving support from the Gentoo crowd, can feel confident in it being a good alternative init to Systemd. The size of Systemd's codebase is kind of disconcerting to me vs a saner init like Openrc. Ah .. yep, gotten lazy, so when upstream and Debian voted the thing in as default init, figured I wouldn't spend much time swimming against the upstream people and just embrace the suck. Errrr ... not that matters, overall I like Systemd well enough.

Figured ah, screw it and googled learning to use the thing vs watching many Linux users run around in circles screaming about impending and certain DOOM. Clearly the folks who know what they're doing quietly setup whichever init they prefer and got on with life. Still think if I got better acquainted with OpenRc, surely could get some gains, at least system overhead savings ? ..

[the_actuary]

I think some others would be far more knowledgeable than me in this, but I think the main advantage of openrc is that it makes life simple. I don't think there's a performance gain by using either openrc or systemd. systemd as an init system is ok, but I don't know what's it's doing managing a million other things? I think gentoo users in general prefer openrc because they have an option to do so, and they find it simpler to do so. In most other distros, you don't exactly get an option of swapping your init.

[technotorpedo]

^ Thinking it'd have to reduce some in terms of memory + cpu-overhead. Quick google said .. as of 2020 Systemd was about 5% the size of the dang Linux kernel !! Of course that's likely expanded further since then. OpenRc is no doubt tiny compared. No biggie either way, thing about opting for Systemd is I can be confident it's getting a bunch of upstream pro-development attention. Think the same for Openrc because the Gentoo folks endorse it.

Still major upstream players adopted Systemd, so made me disinclined to endlessly dodging whatever decisions they make, hard depends, what other open source projects end up doing, no init script's this and that's etc and blahblah. Systemd works fine for me, never had the horror stories I've seen others talk about with it. So far all issues experienced were Pebcak/self-inflicted with Systemd and not hard to resolve.

Wouldn't be too tough to switch it out still on Debian, at least don't think it'd be. Mx gnu/Linux keeps pace with stable releases and they still have the shim thing. Could install from their repo's as needed. Not astronomically confident in the ability of the people who dev/maintain that distro personally and do have udev installed here. Not saying anything negative about the Mx people either. Just my impression/feelings on things.

[technotorpedo]

Dang it more ramblings. Had reservations about the systemd-shim thing a long time. As upstream and major projects start developing to use Systemd, whatever features in it and actually expect to interact with it, require it to actually do things, having some dummy package named Systemd installed, going, yep, I'm here, Systemd is installed, yep, dependencies are satisfied here ... Then sending whatever signals-etc to /dev/null isn't likely to work out smoothly or who knows, maybe it will but am against it for the longhaul.

I don't dislike Mx (haven't tried it, no plans to), seems well thought of overall, gets positive reviews, apparently reasonably popular. Though noticed they actually resorted to putting out a paid bounty to get some developer to keep the systemd-shim thing they use working. Tells me a couple things, a) they must not have a dev inhouse with the skill to handle it, b) who'd they hire to do it, how'd they vet this person and if you don't have anyone inhouse with the know-how, how can they check this persons work ? Well then there's c) They cared enough about the userbase and a feature they want to offer to put money, where mouth is too. Oh well ... sorry getting off topic. Errrr more offtopic ?

Hey ... systemd-analyze is same on Gentoo, as anything else surely.

[technotorpedo]

In other dorkish news:

[Goverp]

Eccles, why do you need all that memory?
Well Bluebottle, to put the time in.
Why?
Well, if someone asks me the time, I can tell them.
Oooh, that's clever Eccles. Will you tell me the time please?
No Bluebottle, I can't find it.

(with apologies to spike milligna)
_________________
Greybeard

[figueroa]