Comments on: Ubuntu 10.04 filesystems and boot times

By: James

James — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:18:49 +0000

EXT4 can be created without a journal.

mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdX

And EXT2 can be mounted as EXT4.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:31:19 +0000

I don’t see what the fuss is about.
My Ubintu Server takes Five Minutes to boot from a USB key.

I have 4 x 2Tb disks in a mdraid 5, so used a /boot on usb and a root and data raid5 on disk.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:12:12 +0000

That's bootchart.

By: n3mo

n3mo — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:10:49 +0000

Hey, what program do you use for creating these graphics ?

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:01:37 +0000

Just tested Xubuntu 10.04 i386, and there doesn’t seem to be any slowness. I just created two partions, / and swap, and used ext4 for the /. No other speed tweaks.

It still used just over 250MB of memory after a fresh boot-up, though. Standerd Ubuntu uses well over 350MB on my netbook, too, so could you check how much RAM your machine has? Lack of memory may be causing the slowness.

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:37:03 +0000

AMD 3200 — isn’t that a 2GHz 64-bit CPU? I’m surprised that even Ubuntu could be slow on that…

Then again, it’s been a long time since I used Ubuntu on a single-core system. *eyes the HP Pavilion a1000 he’s Frankenstein-monster’d to life with a Mini-ATX PSU* I’ll get back to you on that, though.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:10:59 +0000

Ubuntu gets slower with each release.
It’s pretty much unusable for me now on my old AMD3200 system.
What the heck have they done to this distro?

By: Pogeymanz

Pogeymanz — Sun, 23 May 2010 17:56:46 +0000

These issues don’t test filesystem speed or responsiveness or IO speed. Bootcharts are confounded by the mount-time required for certain filesystems. If I remember correctly, it is known that JFS takes a long time to mount, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a slow filesystem.

By: peterix

peterix — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:39:23 +0000

You must be pretty lucky then Ive got three machines here that have these problems.

By: Luca

Luca — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:12:23 +0000

Erm… I may just be being dumb, but ext4 took 33.31 secs to boot and ext2 took 33.48. That means ext4 is faster, contrary to what you said in your post. Right?

It is entirely possible that USB will be faster than a laptop HDD, mainly due to random access being faster. The actual transfer speeds between the two are usually about the same as well.

Have a look at these two articles from 2008. The flash drive tops out reads of 28Mb/s, and the average of the slowest (of the high-end range at that time – thats a mouthful) is 37Mb/s. However the real key at bootup is random access, hence the flash drive wins.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-hard-drive,2015.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006.html

One thing you might want to do is to upgrade to a newer, faster, HDD. I upgraded to a 7200rpm drive, and the speed increase is definitely noticeable, fortunately the affect on battery life and noise isn’t