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

New with Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" is the ability to create a bootable USB flash drive with a persistent filesystem.


I compared the time to start from when I pressed enter for "Try Ubuntu" until the desktop had loaded with the panel, icons, and wallpaper. Here's what I found:

USB flash drive: 1:44
CD: 2:40

That's a pretty significant improvement in speed! Also, since there's no CD to spin up, anything requiring data off the drive occurs with much less lag. Of course, your results may vary. Transfer speeds on flash drives do vary. I found that my Cruzer Micro 2GB was much faster than a PNY Attache 1GB.

This is so great, one of my flash drives will probably be dedicated to it. :-)