Craig Younkins' Blog

After seeing Lifehacker blog about a number of Ubuntu speedups, I decided to test some of them to see their actual effectiveness.

The test machine was a Lenovo T61 with a Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2 ghz and 3GB RAM. All boot times are from the grub menu (started when I pressed enter to start the boot) to the appearance of the login screen. I started with a completely fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.10 which I updated and rebooted 3 times. The default settings are "concurrency=none" in /etc/init.d/rc, but I'm unsure of the default readahead settings. It's possible Ubuntu tries to create a profile after installation, but I have no proof of that, so I assume there is no profile.

The results:

• No modifications (concurrency=none, no readahead profile) - 29.8 sec
• Concurrency=shell, no readahead profile - 29.2 sec
• Concurrency=shell, readahead profile - 28.7 sec
• Concurrency=none, rebuilt readahead profile - 29.2 sec

Also keep in mind all timings are subject to human error. My conclusion is that there are no notable improvements from implementing these tweaks, even with a dual core processor.

Here is my full action log:

• Install 8.10
• Update
• Restart x 2
  
• Restart, timed boot - 30.0 sec
• Restart, timed boot - 29.6 sec
• Set concurrency=shell in /etc/init.d/rc
• Restart, timed boot - 29.9 sec
• Restart, timed boot - 29.1 sec
• Restart, added "profile" to end of grub line
• Timed boot for profile creation - 1 min, 27.7 sec (This is normal)
• Restart, timed boot - 28.7 sec
• Restart, timed boot - 27.9 sec
• Restart, timed boot - 29.6 sec
• Set concurrency=none in /etc/init.d/rc
• Restart, added "profile" to end of grub line
• Timed boot for profile creation - 1 min, 29.1 sec (This is normal)
• Restart, timed boot - 29.3 sec
• Restart, timed boot - 29.1 sec