What Contributes The Most To System Boot Time?

Replies

• 

  Prasad Ajinkya

  Wow, it's been a long time since I frequented the forums, and I can see so much change. Awesome improvements. CE, your web team rocks!! Enough of my ramblings ... though.
  
  Here are my thoughts on the same -
  When you boot a computer, the system first does a quick sanity check of the hardware, the BIOS to ensure that the machine is in operable conditions. You can skip this, but its not advised. These days this time has been reduced to almost negligible.
  
  Then the system needs to know where are the core files of the operating system. These will then be loaded (i think these days, this is the bottleneck).
  
  Once the core OS files are loaded, then the GUI loads. Finally giving access to the user to play around. 8 seconds is impressive indeed, but hey, its windows 😀
  
  On a unrelated note, have you seen the Windows 8 BSOD? Its extremely abstract (simply gives the error code and nothing else. The color is still blue though.)
  
  If you do want to save time, I think you can save the time time taken to load all OS files by putting them on a separate memory location which is faster than your hard-drive (ala L1/L2 cache). It's a crazy idea, but hey, thats why I am here!
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Good to see you back. I'm yet to check the Windows 8 BSOD. What I'm thinking (just a crazy thought) that it's actually the RAM & HDD R/W speeds that eventually contribute to the system load time. Is that true? Has anyone had a chance to experience how SSDs stored operating systems load?
  
  But that would mean our phones should boot instantly. Does not happen. 😨
• 

  Prasad Ajinkya

  Biggie, thats precisely what I am saying. If you put your OS files in a faster memory, then the load times will go down.
  
  Which is interesting, because each OS has different native file systems (inode tables for unix-based, fat32 and ntfs for windows).
• 

  PraveenKumar Purushothaman

  Few things which contribute to the boot time:
  1. HDD R/W Speed
  2. Prefetch Content
  3. RAM Paged Memory
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Is there an evidence of SSD based storages make the systems boot faster? Has anyone done an experiment?
• 

  PraveenKumar Purushothaman

  The_Big_K

  Is there an evidence of SSD based storages make the systems boot faster? Has anyone done an experiment?

  Yup!!! Try MacBook Air vs. MacBook Pro, you can see awesome difference, when you run Microsoft Office 2011! 😀 Air starts it too fast and it uses SSD! 😀
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Praveen-Kumar

  Yup!!! Try MacBook Air vs. MacBook Pro, you can see awesome difference, when you run Microsoft Office 2011! 😀 Air starts it too fast and it uses SSD! 😀

  What's the average boot time on Air? I often get surprized to see the difference between OSX devices and Windows based PCS. OSX seems to be at least 3x faster than Windows running on similar hardware. I think OS too contributes to the boot time.
  
  But the question I asked originally remains unanswered - what can be done to improve the boot time? Say on the OS & Hardware level?
• 

  PraveenKumar Purushothaman

  The_Big_K

  But the question I asked originally remains unanswered - what can be done to improve the boot time? Say on the OS & Hardware level?

  Simple answer:
  1. Increase Processor ClockSpeed.
  2. Increase the RAM Memory!
  But these two seem stupid and too literal...
  
  In OS Level, they can optimize the function calls and stuff... 😀
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Would like to hear more opinions on this.