At least part of the boot process is usually running some diagnostics – checking memory, making sure that the disk inodes aren’t corrupted and such. And given that both memory and disk sizes have increased, I suspect that’s part of the problem.
All this talk of slowing boot times reminds me of a quote, from Niklaus Wirth I think, something like, “Software becomes slower faster than hardware becomes faster.” (He also replied, apocryphally, in respose to a question about whether to pronounce his surname like ‘worth’ or ‘vert’, “It depends if you want to call me by name or by value.” Shout out to my Pascal nerd homies out there.)
Anyway, yes, I did have something relevant to add to the thread. For a while Microsoft touted this massive “OnNow” initiative for instant booting, but Googling for it now it seems it’s little more than a marketing wrapper around automated power management and StandBy which has already been mentioned: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/winpowmgmt.mspx
Not sure, but I think the read time from an SD type card is pretty slow, relatively speaking.
A standard SD card can read and write at about 10MB/s. Even the really fast ones only go up to about 30MB/s. Still not very fast. Plus, they have finite read and write cycles. If you put an operating system onto a 1GB card and run it for a few days or weeks, the card will reach it’s last cycle and will not work anymore. The number of cycles is very high, where an average person using a card for a digital camera will never reach the limit, but if you load an OS onto the card it will be constantly be written to and eventually die.
Only if you put the swap partition/file on the card.
A computer that used an SD card for the OS and a Ramdisk for swap would load pretty quickly.
Good point.
Many embedded computers turn on “instantly”. These computers usually store their software in ROM (read-only memory).
I’ve also written software for systems that boot over a network. They load a system image from a network server. They can be up and running within seconds of being turned on.
If you broaden your horizons beyond “PCs and Macs”, you will find many computers that don’t suffer from the performance and reliability problems of the typical desktop computer.
well the xp folder on my pc is just over 2 gigs, with a server tower/motherboard you could easily load up that much ram but I have no idea how you would configure it to run off the ram chips.
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- NewEgg shows the Gigabyte i-Ram ramdrive card for $129. It’d cost about $500 now to buy it and load it up with 4 x 1Gb sticks.
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- NewEgg shows the Gigabyte i-Ram ramdrive card for $129. It’d cost about $500 now to buy it and load it up with 4 x 1Gb sticks.
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-Homer Simpson
These sorts of solid state hard drives have been around for a while, but don’t help boot times as much as you might think. The bottleneck in booting is not really reading from the hard drive, but searching for new hardware and other tasks. Maximum PC magazine demonstrated this years ago with a RAM drive, which didn’t boot up much faster than a regular hard drive. More recently, Tom’s hardware did this with the i-Ram as well and came to the same conclusion:
If you really want fast “startup” times, you can’t really boot the computer. You should use hibernate or suspend instead. A suspended computer still uses a little power but turns on about as fast as a TV. Hibernate is a little slower but actually could benefit from a super fast hard drive.
There is no technological reason that prevents a quick boot.
It is purely economics, there is not enough gain to write the OS this way.
For some embedded systems (as previously noted), there is a quick boot and clearly there is an economic gain, but for average PC use there just isn’t.
When you boot the PC, the OS executes all kinds of different routines to get the machine into a running state. A quick boot could have most of this pre-calculated and the memory image would be loaded from ROM or Disk.
I’m not sure if I agree entirely with Tom’s conclusion there. The reason there was only a slight decrease in boot time is because going from a 7200rpm drive to a 10,000rpm isn’t that much of an upgrade. I think if you were to split the information over two, or even four 10,000rpm drive you’d see a much bigger increase.
Though I accept the fact that you cannot create an instant booting computer by increasing hard drive performance, it has to be a large part of it. Think about when you’re staring at the XP loading screen, the hard drive is working like mad. The computer is retrieving data off the hard drive and it takes longer if you have alot of stuff installed and having a slower drive will increase that time.
Err, the article I linked is comparing a “drive” that is actually made out of RAM to a conventional 10,000 rpm hard drive. Not two hard drives, one at 7200 and the other at 10000. This stack of ram posing as a hard drive (the Gigabyte i-Ram ramdrive card) benchmarked at over 100 MB/sec under all tests, essentially exhausting the bandwidth of the SATA I interface. This should be almost ten times as fast as a conventional 10,000 rpm hard drive during Windows startup, according to this windows startup benchmark (the Raptor clocks in at a mere 11.2MB/s).
The fact that this only led to a modest 9% improvement in startup time tends to support the conclusion that hard drive speed is only part of what slows down booting.
Maximum PC demonstrated a similar finding almost a year ago, when they discovered that adding drives to a raid array did not significantly shorten the time it took Doom 3 to load. In fact after 4 or 5 drives it started loading slower, because of the extra time the CPU had to waste managing the RAID array. It was pretty shocking to the Maximum PC authors themselves, since up until this point they had been touting RAID as an absolute requirement of a good gaming rig.
Gotcha, sorry about that.
That’s the point though; the stuff loaded at boot is highly configurable by the user (albeit not necessarily knowingly); PC boot time is a tradeoff against ease and flexibility of configuration.
I am not sure if I totally agree with you on this one. For the average user, and a person whose computer isnt turned on all the time, lets say he wants to quickly check the weather on his computer , or wants to check out the most recent posts on the straight dope before going out, he’s got to turn on the computer, wait for it to boot, click on the explorer icon, wait for that to load, click on the favorites, and then wait for that to load. When youve got your keys in hand, and your girlfriend is screaming for you to hurry up, this doesnt only take 3 or so minutes…this takes HOURS. I think if they they started making computers that were instantaneous like the t.v. they would sell over ones that took a while to boot (as long as everything else was equal). There would be no reason to have your computer “sleep”…i mean how many of us have a sleep mode on t.v.? we dont because we dont need one I think.
From my experience with fixing up other people’s computers it seems like alot of people have way too much stuff loading at startup. It makes me cringe to see a computer boot up with 15 icons in the system tray, and the person not having a clue what they do. This is especially true of systems purchased through Dell or HP or other big manufacturers that preload tons and tons of software that never gets used. After I do a clean install of XP on their system they are amazed at how quick the system starts up and how all that stuff that loaded was unneccesary. This of course, only helps startup times after the XP loading screen, but it really helps.
I don’t really have a need for instant startup functionality except if they manage to integrate it well in laptops. But even then, it would just be a luxury as my laptop starts up really quickly.
Can’t seem to find a price anywhere for the laptops [the gold 17 inch display one] any idea of the price? I figure that is something like a luxury car - if you have to ask teh price you cant afford it=\
but i can still drool=)