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Topic: start apps at boot?< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
curaga Offline





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Posted: April 22 2008,14:54 QUOTE
A bit late I s'pose, but what you want could have been readahead.
Over half of the long firefox starting time comes from reading all those files of it, totaling about 16mb plus all the other libs it uses. So if you use readahead to read commonly used files to cache during boot, they can be accessed instantly from ram, and firefox starts up in ~3 secs too.

The C code of it is in a thread titled "Speeding the DSL boot with readahead", I don't remember which section though.

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lucky13 Offline





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Posted: April 22 2008,17:24 QUOTE
Doesn't readahead slow down boot noticeably?

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curaga Offline





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Posted: April 23 2008,14:44 QUOTE
No, it's not blocking if ran in the background, and if started when the HD is not accessed, there's no slowdown at all. Even doing it the Ubuntu style, always in the background and so slowing HD accessing processes a bit, can drop boot time to near half (when used for boot files of course).

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lucky13 Offline





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Posted: April 23 2008,14:59 QUOTE
?

It's been my understanding that readahead really slows things down on lower-spec machines (such as when booting a live CD):
Quote
"Normal KNOPPIX" with less than 256MB memory was faster than "KNOPPIX + readahead".
"KNOPPIX + readahead" became faster if there was more than 384MB memory.

http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/readahead/index-en.html

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mikshaw Offline





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Posted: April 23 2008,16:52 QUOTE
Caching things is always going to necessarily increase ram use, which is always going to affect performance unless you have more ram than you need to cache+run the rest of the system.  I never could understand the "feature" that some application have that keeps them open in the background to speed up their startup.  It wouldn't be bad if they were like Linux in that it releases cached memory when needed for other purposes, but apparently this is not the case. What they should focus on instead is making their applications lighter, in my opinion.

Also, backgrounding *anything* during boot sounds like a really bad idea to me. A boot failure may take down the backgrounded processes, and likely not do it safely. This is particularly troublesome if you're backgrounding other parts of the boot process, but I guess that's not the issue here.

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