The boot-chart madess is going around. Be warned, this is almost as bad as the "somethingfunny test" madnesses reaching blogs from time to time.

Well, I was infected, too. I ran boot-chart to see how well my hacked together "minit"-based system does.

Be warned, boot-chart is an ugly hack. Don't look to closely at what its boot script does. It basically runs "top -b > logfile". This sucks. Because top is quite different from distribution to distribution. On my system, it doesn't include the PPID information that bootchart uses. Why didn't they do things just right and get exactly the information they want from /proc themselves? Parsing top output is not that much easier (especially since it varies...)

That is the reason why processes, for example the apache stuff, are not grouped in this chart - my top output doesn't include the needed info.

Here are my resuls. Full chart also available. This is a Thinkpad A31p with a P4M 1.8 GHz (no Centrino).

30 seconds till gdm is ready, that is okay. Sure, things could be faster.

Note that my system is not tuned at all. In fact I'm even running hotplug twice: once it is run by rcS (where I use the unmodified Debian rcS) and once by my init system (because I want it included in my normal process so it's run without special handling on hibernate resume)

Using a preloader would probably help a lot, but I'm really eager to get the xserver, cupsd and gdm tuning results from Ubuntu... ;-)

Please don't flood me with questions about "enit" and "enitdir". The first is just a slight - experimental - modification of "minit", and "enitdir" is a tool I once posted to the minit list. It basically monitors a directory and starts all services there with minit. When a service disappears it is stopped again. I use this to switch to a "suspend" runlevel: I shut down mysql, apache etc. before going into hibernate to conserve memory (and thus my suspend is faster) "enitdir" doesn't appear in the primary chart - it is considered idle, since it uses almost no CPU (only writing a couple of chars to a socket and scanning one dir, then using the kernel dnotify interface and going to sleep) A tiny app - less than 6k, statically linked, 28k resident size in memory 0:00.00 CPU time according to top. ;-)