Boot Process Visualization
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.
There are some charts linked from a post here.
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.
Here's an example image for you to ogle:
http://people.redhat.com/davidz/bootchart.png.
Here's the mirror:
bootchart.sourceforge.net
Ziga
Here are some pictures that are not slashdotted yet: one, two, three.
They are taken from here.