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Boot Process Visualization

Posted by timothy on from the what-in-what-order dept.

zigam writes "The time needed to boot desktop Linux systems is becoming an issue. That's why I recently took the challenge posted by Red Hat's Owen Taylor on the Fedora developers list and came up with a tool for visualization of the boot process. It collects performance data during the boot up and then renders an SVG or PNG performance chart. It immediately helped Red Hat developers solve some issues and I have since received boot charts from other GNU/Linux developers as well. Solaris kernel developers reported success in improving their boot process too." Update: 12/15 20:04 GMT by T : Sorry, someone decided your time was worth wasting; no more mirrored bootchart.

6 of 536 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mirror? by gniv · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are some charts linked from a post here.

  2. Re:For starters.. by wizbit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Try reading David Zeuthen's analysis of the FC boot process (with charts) over on the fedora archives. Very interesting - among other things, nearly 200 MB of files(!) are buffered while starting GNOME - quite a footprint - and apparently by putting those files on a separate (non-fragged) partition he sped process by nearly 30 seconds and reports OOo and Firefox start times of around 3 seconds.

  3. Quick Link by Roofus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's an example image for you to ogle:

    http://people.redhat.com/davidz/bootchart.png.

  4. Re:Mirror? by zigam · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's the mirror:
    bootchart.sourceforge.net

    --
    Ziga
  5. Re:IIS? by gniv · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here are some pictures that are not slashdotted yet: one, two, three.

    They are taken from here.

  6. That's why by gr8_phk · · Score: 3, Informative
    So THATs why XP boots so fast....

    As an embedded programmer, I've got to get many startup diagnostics and initializations done in the shortest time possible (under 1 second usually) - otherwise you'd be waiting for your car to boot every time you turn on the key. Everything in parallel that can be. Dependancies are mapped out and a static start sequence is defined. Linux has a more variable set of things to do, so I'd expect a more flexible implementation. This shocks me that there is NO implementation.

    It doesn't matter what MS does, every application wants load at boot time so it will respond quicker later - this just kills my boot time. Yah, a whole tray full of crap starts and I sometimes use one of those things.