ive been using/managing/fixing computers and servers for 40+ years. from old AS400 to full on cloud bullshit. i can remember only a single time where boot time mattered… when microsofts DNS failures caused servers to take 15 minutes to boot… other than that there hasnt been a single time it has ever been a problem or discussed as an issue to be resolved.
so why the fuck is it constantly touted as some benefit!? it grinds my gears when i see anyone stating how fast their machine booted.
am i alone in this?
There’s diminishing returns. I don’t think people care much as long as it’s under a minute. Between 1-3 minutes they care a bit. 3-10 minutes and it becomes tedious. 10+ and people get very irritated.
If you’ve ever worked on a corporate system, that last category is very common no matter what the hardware is.
As for people bragging, that’s all it is. They’re saying it’s so fast it can do [meaningless task] in an impressively short amount of time. Presumably, this translates into something more meaningful but harder to benchmark. For instance, they tell you it boots in 5 seconds because that means it can reopen all of their Chrome tabs in 30 seconds.
My windows partition takes upwards of 2 minutes to actually be ready to do anything, my Linux partition is ready to rock ten seconds after I push the power button and four of those seconds are intentional delay to choose a boot disc.
I didn’t care about it before, but I sure do now. Booting into windows these days is torturous in comparison.
Boot time isn’t as important to me as the time it takes to be ready for use. I notice this more on Windows machines where it gets to the desktop and it’s still fucking around with a bunch of stuff in the background for a minute or two.
I don’t remember the last time I rebooted by laptop. Of course it doesn’t run Windows either.
For a general purpose work machine, no. Even for a gaming desktop, probably not. For a gaming laptop, maybe, depending on your lifestyle.
For a gaming handheld? Yeah, definitely. You want a good battery-saving sleep mode, and a quick shutdown/startup as well.
The other scenario I can see is field work machines, for kiosks or task logging, especially if you need to change sites on a regular basis.
it didn’t matter to me until i got a PC which booted super fast
For a server? Absolutely doesn’t matter as long as it’s not preposterous. Turning a server on can be done entirely linearly for almost every server and the slowdown is irrelevant.
For a desktop? Almost irrelevant, but it should be fast enough so you don’t get bored enough to actually start doing something else.
Laptop? I actually like those to boot fast. I’m much more likely to pull one out to do something real quick, and so my laptop booting in a few seconds makes standing with my laptop on my arm to send a file real quick as I’m going somewhere feasible.
Isn’t your laptop use case the reason that sleep exists?
Typically, yes. I have a tendency to use sleep when I’m coming back in some set period of time, and power off when I’m “going”.
If I’m walking to a different room I’ll close the lid and stick in under my arm which makes it sleep, or going to the bathroom or cooking dinner or something. If I’m leaving and sticking it in my bag, I tend to power it off.It’s a combination of not wanting the battery to die in sleep mode, and not wanting to put a heat generating device in my bag even if it’s greatly reduced.
Thinking about it, powering down also drops the drive encryption keys from memory so it’s arguably more secure. Not in the least why I do it that way, but it’s an advantage now that I think about it.
Since I’m more likely to use the laptop like a super-phone, I appreciate it when it becomes usable fast regardless of what state I left it in.
Personally I’m not sure I really shut down my laptop. Only restart as required. But now I think about it, boot time is important for restarts!
These production clusters I have at work are a nightmare to (re)boot. They run in a rather hostile environment, so sometimes we need to take it all down due to external factors. The rule of thumb is that it takes and hour to shut down and two hours to start.
There are 6 servers, and they have to start (and stop) in the correct order. Each takes around 10 minutes to boot, so if all is to be done correctly, it’s roughly 40 minutes. The rest of the startup procedure is checking internal stuff as well as interfacing with various robotics and misc.
It’s possible to gamble a bit, though: start 1, wait a bit and then start the next one, hoping that they come online in the correct order. But sometimes it doesn’t and this gamble results in having to shut down everything and start over.
…If you follow procedure, that is. I know the system well enough that I can start all machines at the same time and just interrogate and sort out any misbehaving components, thus cutting down the startup time a lot.
So yeah, while the system takes a lot of time to start, it’s mostly due to procedural reasons. In theory it could all be booted and ready in~15 minutes if we make the startup sequence more forgiving.
That’s brutal. Is it clustered data storage of some sort? All the most offensive startup and shutdown sequence I’ve seen are giant storage systems.
You nailed it. Each server has 36 hard drives forming three RAIDs. These 18 RAIDs form a disaster-tolerant beegfs volume of 1.6PB.
On top of that, there’s a bunch of highly specialized geophysical software, an oracle database, and misc mundane services.
I know it was quite popular to measure boot times when SSDs were first coming out because of the massive speed difference there was from HDDs. I think its just a fun/easy metric to measure and report on today. Most probably don’t care if its 10 or 20 seconds.
in the 80s/early 90s we used a directory listing to demonstrate how fast the machine was… when the pentiums started to hit, it finally listed faster than you could read.
Only if its abysmal.
It didn’t matter to me until I had a laptop that booted super fast. And now it matters…
I use QubesOS and dom0 boot takes a while (haven’t been bothered to figure out why it waits till sys-whatever starts before dropping me into the login screen). The boot times for the VMs once the main boot is done matters cos that’s how long launching a program takes but that’s usually pretty quick.
I think they’re just new boot goofin’.
I guess I do. I put the computer (a desktop) into suspend most nights so that it’s pretty much up and running as soon as I turn it on the next day.
Even so, rebooting doesn’t take that long. 30 seconds tops. Definitely not enough time to visit the bathroom or make a hot drink.
But the advantages to suspend are that it’s quick and all my programs are as I left them. A reboot undoes most of that.
Yes, hibernating is also an option to keep open programs, but why do that when it can be quicker?
My only real concern with putting the machine into suspend is if there’s a power cut and things end up in a weird state or I lose work because programs weren’t closed properly, but then, that could happen at any point when I’m using it too.
I find it rather amusing that big servers are optimized to never fail with redundant pdus and fans and the like but as soon as you have to restart such a device, prepare for 10-20 minute downtime.
My take is: before we had ssds so that a shitty configured windows pc could take up to 5-10 mins to boot, that really was a problem. Nowadays, especially were many devices use suspend instead of shutdown and are much faster, not any more.
On the other hand, my fucking smart tv takes 2 minutes to boot and i hate it.
I’m not sure if you’re including consumers in this. I have a gaming PC. When I get a message that friends are looking for a game, I want it to be on immediately so I can play.
Am I willing to do something about that? Like get a better drive, finally upgrade to UEFI, etc? No. But I want fast.
this is fairly true… ive not been exposed to end users not in some corp or organization environment…
