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The Death of Booting Up
theodp writes "'Booting up was a bear,' recalls Slate's Farhad Manjoo, 'something to be avoided at all costs.' But now, he adds, 'It's time to rejoice, because all that's in the past. Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster. Apple's MacBook Air loads up in 16 seconds, and machines based on Google's cloud-based Chrome OS boast boot times of under 10 seconds. Even Windows computers are fast — with the right set-up, your Windows 7 laptop can load just as quickly as a MacBook.' Perhaps at home, but how's that working out for you at work? Have reports of the death of long boot times been greatly exaggerated?"
With suspend-to-RAM, I only boot-up/reboot maybe once a month on each of my Windows computers.. 10 seconds to return to where I was when I "turned it off". Why turn it off, why?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
My laptop can go for weeks without rebooting. It wakes up within a second. Isn't this decade marvellous? :)
SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.
It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.
Sure a MacBook Air can boot in under a minute. It also can't run most of what we use and costs WAY more than the average business computer.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
There's one good reason why I do that.
I live in a VERY hot country, if I leave my computer on for a long time, the components will just melt, or at least it'll affect performance sooner than it should.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but heat is bad for computer parts.
Suspend to RAM/Sleep keeps everything running, it does save some electricity, but I don't know if the savings are worth it.
Maybe I should try suspending to disk?
My HTC EVO 3D Android phone takes 2.5 minutes to boot.
The best way I have found to speed up the corporate boot process is to disconnect the LAN cable until you are at the desktop, and then restore any drive mappings etc. manually. Even then, it can take several times longer than at home... :(
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
good news, because I like to reboot often and hard just in case those memory bits get too comfortable in the same spot they've been sitting for months at a time there.
You can't handle the truth.
The worst I've dealt with is the HP DL380. Those things took nearly three minutes just to POST. To access the RAID config you had to hit a key combo within a 3-second window at end of the POST.
That was years ago. I think that was the low point, but that's just anecdotal.
Back in the days when i used an Amiga, it booted in 6 seconds from cold (yes i know, i was sad enough to time it)... And i had to reboot fairly often because the AmigaOS used a flat memory model which suffered from gradual memory fragmentation, and allowed one errant program to take down the whole system.
Later, i moved onto Unix/Linux systems and although they sometimes took a long time to boot, it was extremely rare that you would reboot them.. One of my unix workstations clocked up 700 days of uptime before a power failure took it out for instance.
More recently, with laptops i can just suspend them...
I hate the concept of having to reboot, i usually have a large number of programs running and would hate having to load everything up again and lay them out across my workspaces.
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>"Perhaps at home, but how's that working out for you at work?"
Let me tell you how it works out at work. I just took delivery of brand new HP ML350 G6 servers. 48GB RAM, Dual 6 core Xeons at 3.06Ghz. FAST!
It takes exactly 2.5 *MINUTES* before I get the BIOS beep for it to load GRUB. Linux then takes, oh, 20 seconds to boot (all the way to X), and that is with dozens of services, RAID checks, etc.
I complained bitterly to HP. Sure it won't be booted very often ONCE IT IS CONFIGURED. But it more than DOUBLED the first few man days of setup due to waiting forever every time I made a BIOS change, every time I had to key in a firmware license, upgrade the BIOS, boot into the RAID setup, setup iLO2, after kernel changes, etc.
It is 2011 and the fastest computer I have ever seen is, by far, the slowest booting machine I have ever seen. And I have been doing this for 25 years.
Has this self-check helped you in any way in the last 10 years, unless building the machine yourself? You'd think that at least the memory check would be good for something, but it isn't, otherwise we wouldn't need something like memtest. On most OEM computers, you simply get the logo of the company who made the computer... Not even the "useful", but "scary" information the computers of yonder showed you (Usually you can enable in in the BIOS to do that, but not on all machines).
Anecdote: I had this weird situation where I got a dumpster sourced laptop. It had only 256MB RAM, I played around with different sticks to see if it would boot. Booted fine, so I thought... Nice, now it has 512MB RAM, I'll install Debian... During the PXE boot install I get a big red dialog telling me that there was not enough memory. I was really "WTF!?!". Turns out that I didn't insert de DIMM deep enough and that it booted with 640K, which this particular machine had on-motherboard (which is very rare...). The OEM screen showed right, up without errors. So those self tests don't do much in the first place.
Try having a defective CPU? Won't even boot... Self test? A few beeps if you're lucky.
As a dumpster diver, I get all kinds of machines on my desk. It's always fun to find whatever failed (if something failed, often it's just a certain OS from Redmond that got heavily infected). The POST is useful to me, but not all that useful... To most end user, just a dialog "Sorry, hardware is broken" would be more than enough.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Frankly, the new technologies that allow me to boot up my computer and resume my work where I left off in a matter of seconds make it much more likely that I will turn my computer off when I'm not using it.
I've never understood the machismo behind "345 days without rebooting". Unless you're a mission-critical server.
I pay the electric bill, so if I'm not using it, it gets switched off.
I fired up an old win-95 machine about a year ago out of desperation, the thing could go from power off to running word 95 in about 10 seconds flat, I was really impressed, and somewhat saddened by how far we have moved backwards since then.
My desktop at work is part of a very large (many thousands) windows domain. My time from boot to usable desktop is measured in minutes, many of them, rarely under 10 minutes. I get to stare at "Applying Personal Settings" for much of that period. Yes, the help desk has been called many times. The only course of action is to completely rebuild the system. Nobody can seem to troubleshoot a windows domain performance problem.
I'm more interested in the death of roaming profiles. In most cases, they are a total waste of resources and greatly degrade the boot process on office PCs.
We've finally done away with them at our office, and it makes a noticeable difference. Once we realized almost no one uses a computer that isn't theirs, we couldn't figure out a good reason to keep them. Instead, they were replaced with folder redirection and the half-dozen people who frequently logged on to conference room computers were told to save their presentations to a shared folder instead of on their desktop.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Have you seen what his work PC actually loads? His experience matches mine with the shitload of crap many multinationals put on their desktops. 10 minutes in not far fetched, even with a good SATA drive. He doesn't mean that his machine is "not booted". He's most likely logged in and he can move his mouse, but actually "doing" anything is extremely slow because the machine itself is still loading so much due to the initial login.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
> But how does the cost of an SSD compare, to 2 years of a worked being unproductive for an extra 7 minutes / day?
The SSD costs more than banning Facebook, which will recover an unproductive 3 hours / day.
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From the beginning of the Windows boot process, to a fully populated and usable desktop, takes my home PC only 9 seconds (no exaggeration, I just timed it). The little Windows animation thing doesn't even half-finish before vanishing. In fact the BIOS takes significantly longer than loading Windows does.
The reason?
- New Corsair Force SSD; and
- I made sure that nothing runs on startup that I don't need
The shut down is even more ridiculous. The "Windows is shutting down..." message barely flickers onto the screen before the machine shuts off.
So yeah, I don't use sleep at all now. Just power down and power back up later. Prior to the SSD my startup took at least 3 times as long (and that was with a 10,000 rpm Raptor, which is no slouch). Buying an SSD was the single best upgrade I have ever bought for any computer - $220 for a huge increase in responsiveness and usability.
And back in the 80's there was systems that was up and running a lot faster since the core was in PROM. Availability within a second.
And how much power-on self-test to detect changes to the configuration of connected hardware? And how to correct programming defects or add capability to interact with new kinds of hardware?
There's your problem right there.
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It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
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Servers take a long time to boot because they have lots of hardware that has to be set up and configured. It isn't as simple as a desktop. Sure on a desktop system you might have one drive controller, and it might just be AHCI and thus require minimal config time. So that part is fast. However on a server you can have some heavy hitting RAID controllers, that run their own little mini OSes complete with web servers and shit. They take a bit more to configure. Also they can't start all their disks at once, they'd kill the PSU, so they have to stage it.
You also have things that just don't exist in a desktop like RAM configuration. In systems with multiple CPUs and lots of RAM, that has to be set up. Is the memory done NUMA (where each CPU can only access the memory its controller has direct access, and it has to ask the other CPU to get data from the other RAM) or uniform (which means they can both directly access RAM, but it is slower)? Maybe the RAM is actually mirrored, for reliability purposes. That takes configuration time a desktop does not.
Also servers often perform a bit more detailed checks on their hardware. They are expected to be reliable, it is not a bad idea to spend a bit of boot time looking things over.
Thing is, you don't hard boot a server very much so it doesn't matter and fast boot time isn't a real emphasis. You usually keep them on and running at all times so who cares if the boot is pokey? On a desktop, since people often shut them off when not in use, boot time is more important.
Can we all agree to enforce mandatory penalties for programmers (or their bosses) who create services and systray apps? Something that makes them really think about whether or not it's necessary to put some bloated application in my system tray. I'm thinking a wedgie for unnecessary services and a cock punch for unnecessary tray apps. Apple, Java, Adobe, HP, I'm looking at you... I'll admit that I really want to give the Quicktime developers a cock punch.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
I submit my punch cards to the operator and pick up the printout the next day.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The SSD costs more than banning Facebook, which will recover an unproductive 3 hours / day.
From my experience, people will have (and need?) downtime during the day whether you get rid of some distractions or not. They will just make other things the distractions in the amount they can get away with and you won't end up with any more throughput and will have decreased morale. Take it from someone that used to study workers behavior as a profession and give the efficiency studies to the employer, we usually throw out the first couple days of data. After a couple days of the inspector checking work times and such, workers go back to their normal routine and ignore the inspector.
That is why it is better to pay for performance and goals than it is for time (where the job allows). Let them manage their own time, just get the job done when it's supposed to be done. (Again not all jobs obviously can be setup this way)
I miss when technology would simply move forward without someone dramatically announcing obituaries.
But... the future refused to change.
Wow, some of the times in this thread are just crazy long. We measure the performance of our boot from the "starting windows" screen (simply because different hardware takes a different amount of time in the POST test / BIOS, but typically only about 8 seconds or so). We measure until the network icon in the system tray shows that it is connected to the internet. In our experience, this is about the same time that the machine will start to respond correctly to input and allow the user - for example - to start Outlook or something. On desktops, the time is about 35 seconds on last generation stuff. Slightly faster on the newest machines. On notebooks with spinning drives it is about 45 seconds. Add SSD to the notebook and it drops another 20% off the time. Again, add about 8 or 10 seconds total for the POST test. It is still under a minute from power on until a usable machine. I don't know what other folks are doing to make their time take longer.
Oh, on Wndows 7 we had to set the "WaitForNetwork" time to 1 second (by default it is 30 seconds!!!) to achieve these times. If Windows 7 spends about 40 seconds with a spinning "circle of wait" on the screen saying "welcome" then you are impacted by the extra 30 second delay. It only affects people with home drives and redirected folders though. If you are seeing long boot times on either Vista or Windows 7 you may want to spend some time with the free Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit (in particular xbootmgr) and find out what is going on. The toolkit comes with the Windows SDK. You can then work with whatever vendor's software is causing the problem and have them fix it.
It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop.
Are you running on IDE? One good sata spin drive for $40 and you'll be booting in 2 minutes. You don't need SSD to experience normality.
You missed the bit where he said "Work PC". That means it's so loaded with enterprise-grade crap and the need to run eight hundred boot scripts that need to download more crap over a network with a latency worthy of a satellite link that it's going to take 10-15 minutes to boot even with a liquid-nitrogen-cooled i7-EE and any kind of SSD you care to mention.
To get a fast boot, the solution is to not run a metric buttload of crap. My Atom-based netbook (pretty much the slowest PC-grade system you can buy) gets to its XP desktop in under 20 seconds. My work machine running Win7 Enterprise, McAfee,three more pages of enterprise-grade bloat on high-end hardware takes a solid ten minutes minimum before I get a usable desktop, and then another several minutes clicking away the Adobe update dialog, the Java update dialog, the another page or so of additional crap before I can get any work done.
No, GP's talking about inventory management software scheduled every 3 hours (and bootup), defragging scheduled for 1AM (postponed until next boot), software update scans scheduled for 4AM (postponed 'til next boot), virus and spyware scans scheduled for 6AM (postponed until next boot), not to mention full POST during boot (a minor pain compared to the others because it doesn't taunt you with an unusable windows login screen).
We could do that, if manufacturers followed a standard for WOL. Some totally power down the NIC if the machine is off, preventing WOL.
One of the biggest things I remember noticing with the Vista RC years back was how much less time I spent waiting for random apps to start during the booting process. A big problem with XP and earlier OSes was that MS didn't have any code to start applications sequentially, which would result in them all rushing to get data off the disk at the same time.
Even now, the time it takes me to boot my much faster desktop with a much faster disk is a few minutes longer than what it takes me to boot my laptop. The main difference being that I've got XP on my desktop and 7 on my laptop.
A ten-minute delay for an employee working 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, is 2500 minutes or 41 2/3 hours of work, a 2% increase in time when the employee can be working. If the computer has a 4-year lifecycle, that's 4 weeks of work at an 8 hour day.
That time may be utilized with up to 100% efficiency depending on the habits of the worker, e.g. if the employee checks work mail or does some other routine action on the computer before working, and does not pipeline another task during the time his computer spends booting up. This is *only* factoring in boot-up delays, and if the employee has any hard-disk-limited transactions during the day.
An employee making $100K/year earns $8k during that time. An employee making $50K/year earns $4k during that time.
Assuming worse factors--a 3-year lifecycle, a 50% time use or 5 minute per day savings, and a $50K/yr employee--the extra employee time would still cost you $1.5K over the machine life cycle.
It is *easily* worth spending an extra $1K on a computer* if it will give an employee an extra five minutes a day. If the employee is paid well or by-the-hour, it is worth significantly more to do so.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
+1. My computer at the place I worked until very recently took at least 20 mins to boot up. That's not an exaggeration - the routine was: get to work, switch on computer, go for a coffee, come back, check on computer, realize it's still booting, wander office to find other people waiting for their machines to boot and make small talk for several more minutes. This happened to over 500 people each day, all whom made at least a six figure salary, so we're talking about $2M+ in lost productivity annually. And each "upgrade" made it worse. Plus, you'd go through the whole 20 minute boot process only to find your computer had been "upgraded" overnight and needed to be rebooted again, or your passwords needed resetting, which also required another reboot!
A lot of people simply stopped shutting down their computers at the end of the day. That caused problems with upgrades that ran at night and which presumed the desktops were off. It got so I asked to be exempted from "upgrades". Then I asked if I could switch to Linux (they offered me a dual boot option but never delivered), then I started doing more and more work from home (on my ubuntu machine, which boots in 17 secs, according to boot chart). It got to the point I very, very rarely even bothered with my office desktop. The company, meanwhile, kept upgrading the network and wondered why people continued to complain about their computers despite the "increased bandwidth".
Of course, this was the same company which spent over a quarter of a million dollars, and $2,300/month for each of their five offices, in the midst of expense pressures, to have video conferencing, which I never once saw used...
I love my SSD at work.
I do software engineering for control systems and some of our software is fairly old... We're talking early 90s for the windows based configuration tools, and 70s for the actual hardware it resides on...
The software does not cache anything. There was no ram for this when it was written... This means that if you copy a sheet of function blocks to a new controller it manually reads through about 50000 files, and a huge nasty database and checks for duplicates on every single 'tag name' for blocks and input/output blocks... Copying 2-3kb of data generates anywhere from a gig to 15 gigs of hd-access...
Yeah, this is a cluster-fuck.
In this specific case an SSD is a glorious piece of hardware. It cuts down the copy slowdown of this software suite by an insane amount. I used to spend maybe 10-15 hours a week just waiting for the software to move stuff from controller-to-controller but now dont have that issue at all.
The company I work for has about 122000 people last time they bragged in a department meeting, and have recently (this summer) moved to ONLY get new machines with solid state drives in them. There will be no spinning media in laptops.
Hell, we install SSDs in the control room clients on oil rigs even as there is a lot of vibration and heat/power consumption is a major issue there.. (The operators love us since it cuts down on the noise too :p)
Saying SSDs are too expensive is asinine now. The cost is tiny compared to the cost of having someone sit on their arse waiting for a slow pc...
It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.
50 weeks a year, (assuming you are in the US and not some slacker euro country where everyone gets off 6 weeks a year) times 5 days a week, times 10 minutes a day, divide by 60, that's more than 40 hours a year watching the computer grind away.
That's assuming you turn it off every day, which you would do, of course, because you need to conserve electricity and not waste the company dime.
If a SSD would massively reduce boot time, and the cost of the SSD and the time to build the comp is less than what the employee wastes in a year watching it boot, why not deploy SSD?
Factor it as a two year payoff - even easier to justify it.
Here is a calculator: http://paidtopoop.com/
Not quite the same thing, but if you're sitting for 10 minutes watching the hourglass spin it's about as productive as using the toilet. You probably do that on the clock too.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Probably so, but it's not like he has a choice in the matter. If you're running a corporate PC with Windows, you have to run some highly restrictive and cumbersome antivirus package. That's just the way it is, thanks to Windows' crappy security. Plus all the other crap the IT department might load onto their PCs: remote backup software, IT big-brother software so the IT people in India can take over your computer whenever they want, weird custom scripts, etc.
Who cares if a brand-new Windows 7 PC (sans antivirus) can boot up in 15 seconds? It's not going to once a giant corporate IT department loads their "standard build" on there with all that stuff. Even worse, what if you have to load VMware and do all your work in multiple VMs? One VM running XP because Win7 can't run the corporate apps, one VM running Linux because the development is there, etc.
Sorry, but this is idiotic. We're not factory workers, we're knowledge workers. The human brain just doesn't work that way, and needs breaks to think about something different. I'm not advocating everyone surfing on Facebook all day long, but the idea that every single thing you do during the day needs to be related to the business is wrong. We salaried workers are already expected to put in (unpaid) overtime to get things done on schedule (assuming the schedule is realistic), so the other side of that equation is that we aren't watched constantly throughout the day to make sure we're not "slacking off". If someone wants to go surf Facebook for 30 minutes during the day, and spends an extra 30 or 60 minutes at his desk at the end of the day, what's the problem?
As for the water cooler thing, what if you don't really like any of the other employees much? My last company was like that. While I had no problem finding people to talk to at my previous jobs, for some reason at this last company I just didn't 'click' with nearly anyone there (unlike the previous job at a big semiconductor company where all the other employees were very interesting people to talk to and great to work with). Sometimes you just don't fit in very well with the people on your team, but you still have to stay there for financial reasons.
allow me to escort myself off your lawn, sir.
Balderdash!
I leave mine on 24/7...it just goes to sleep after 20 minutes of non use. Oh, and about the power consumption? It's a product called electricity. I use it, I pay for it.
Define "boot up".
In the organization from which I just retired, we had a standard metric for basic laptop health. Assuming the user quickly and without errors types in two logins and two passwords, the time from power-on to a "settled down and usable" desktop was 8 minutes. Once in a blue moon, we'd see someone achieve 7 minutes on a new machine, but 8 was the standard. If boot times stretched past 15 minutes, users generally knew to open and ticket and get a tune-up.
I know of about 120,000 users who would jump for joy at boot times measured in seconds instead of minutes.
Yah, I've been seeing that kind of crap a lot lately, even at small companies. Its a cash flow problem, they have to pay the salaries, but they don't have the money for anything else. Doesn't matter if 1/2 the people on salary are sitting around wasting their time doing something an automated process could do.
The perfect example, is the last company I worked for had their top paid developer spending weeks hunting down memory leaks, and crap like that in their product. He kept asking for bounds checker, but they wouldn't spring for the 1.5k. So he "wasted" two months before he threw a fit, and they purchased it. A week later he had killed 99% of the random crashes.
Its just too easy for those people to say, "its going to cost us more money we don't have", rather than understanding the lost opportunity cost. Which is strange because I assume that stuff should be hammered into any MBAs head. Every single decision like that ,digs you deeper into the hole your already in.
SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.
You must either have never used an SSD-based computer or live in a different world than me. My first SSD (Vertex2, sandforce) was the best single improvement in system performance I've ever made. The boot time is fast, but the application launch time (esp. huge apps like Photoshop, VMWare and Eclipse) are a world of difference. In the case of Eclipse, it finally made it usable for me.
I've since installed small boot-SSDs in some of my older laptops (some even SATA1) and have given them a second life.
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Hah, what a troll. Here is a clue retard - get over your zealot fanaticism, your giving Linux users a bad name.
My method has consolidated three physical machines into one, yielding an actual power savings. It makes management easier, and has multiple nice side effects, including standardized hardware from the viewpoint of the Linux installs. If the setup could have worked in a reversed configuration (Win on Linux) I would have run it that way, but graphics performance goes to shit that way, so it didn't happen. So no, you are both wrong and a fucking retard because it is not "the only possible purpose of such setup".
Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster
30 seconds is something to be ashamed of, not brag about.
The Apple II had a boot time measured in milliseconds, and most of that was making the beep sound.
As time wore on, boot times got longer.
A thing of the past? No, long boot times are a relatively recent phenomena.
They will be with us as long as software quality is less important than time to market.
I predict they will die, but not until Moore's law stops, or at least slows down enough that we start thinking of a computer as something we won't replace until it breaks.
Only then will we care about software quality, size, and efficiency.
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