ive been using/managing/fixing computers and servers for 40+ years. from old AS400 to full on cloud bullshit. i can remember only a single time where boot time mattered… when microsofts DNS failures caused servers to take 15 minutes to boot… other than that there hasnt been a single time it has ever been a problem or discussed as an issue to be resolved.
so why the fuck is it constantly touted as some benefit!? it grinds my gears when i see anyone stating how fast their machine booted.
am i alone in this?
For a server? Absolutely doesn’t matter as long as it’s not preposterous. Turning a server on can be done entirely linearly for almost every server and the slowdown is irrelevant.
For a desktop? Almost irrelevant, but it should be fast enough so you don’t get bored enough to actually start doing something else.
Laptop? I actually like those to boot fast. I’m much more likely to pull one out to do something real quick, and so my laptop booting in a few seconds makes standing with my laptop on my arm to send a file real quick as I’m going somewhere feasible.
These production clusters I have at work are a nightmare to (re)boot. They run in a rather hostile environment, so sometimes we need to take it all down due to external factors. The rule of thumb is that it takes and hour to shut down and two hours to start.
There are 6 servers, and they have to start (and stop) in the correct order. Each takes around 10 minutes to boot, so if all is to be done correctly, it’s roughly 40 minutes. The rest of the startup procedure is checking internal stuff as well as interfacing with various robotics and misc.
It’s possible to gamble a bit, though: start 1, wait a bit and then start the next one, hoping that they come online in the correct order. But sometimes it doesn’t and this gamble results in having to shut down everything and start over.
…If you follow procedure, that is. I know the system well enough that I can start all machines at the same time and just interrogate and sort out any misbehaving components, thus cutting down the startup time a lot.
So yeah, while the system takes a lot of time to start, it’s mostly due to procedural reasons. In theory it could all be booted and ready in~15 minutes if we make the startup sequence more forgiving.
That’s brutal. Is it clustered data storage of some sort? All the most offensive startup and shutdown sequence I’ve seen are giant storage systems.
You nailed it. Each server has 36 hard drives forming three RAIDs. These 18 RAIDs form a disaster-tolerant beegfs volume of 1.6PB.
On top of that, there’s a bunch of highly specialized geophysical software, an oracle database, and misc mundane services.
Isn’t your laptop use case the reason that sleep exists?
Isn’t your laptop use case the reason that sleep exists?
I don’t want my laptop to have its battery constantly being drained.
I have it set up to suspend for 10 minutes, and if it’s still suspended, hibernate.
That lets me move it from location to location quickly for short moves, but also means that if I don’t open the thing up again for a week or two, it’s fine.
Typically, yes. I have a tendency to use sleep when I’m coming back in some set period of time, and power off when I’m “going”.
If I’m walking to a different room I’ll close the lid and stick in under my arm which makes it sleep, or going to the bathroom or cooking dinner or something. If I’m leaving and sticking it in my bag, I tend to power it off.It’s a combination of not wanting the battery to die in sleep mode, and not wanting to put a heat generating device in my bag even if it’s greatly reduced.
Thinking about it, powering down also drops the drive encryption keys from memory so it’s arguably more secure. Not in the least why I do it that way, but it’s an advantage now that I think about it.
Since I’m more likely to use the laptop like a super-phone, I appreciate it when it becomes usable fast regardless of what state I left it in.
Personally I’m not sure I really shut down my laptop. Only restart as required. But now I think about it, boot time is important for restarts!
True! I tend to power off if I use the software button, and suspend if I close the lid. I think it’s the difference between “packing up” and pausing for a minute.
There’s diminishing returns. I don’t think people care much as long as it’s under a minute. Between 1-3 minutes they care a bit. 3-10 minutes and it becomes tedious. 10+ and people get very irritated.
If you’ve ever worked on a corporate system, that last category is very common no matter what the hardware is.
As for people bragging, that’s all it is. They’re saying it’s so fast it can do [meaningless task] in an impressively short amount of time. Presumably, this translates into something more meaningful but harder to benchmark. For instance, they tell you it boots in 5 seconds because that means it can reopen all of their Chrome tabs in 30 seconds.
how are you over 40 and you don’t remember the boot times before SSDs?
its not that things didnt take a bit longer, its that i never cared between a minute or 5. ive never been a part of a conversation where a customer or coworker lamented boot times at all. it just never mattered. no one ever said ‘gee how can we make this faster’ or ‘if only there were a product that booted faster we would prefer to buy that!’
even when i worked in 911/emergency services, it wasnt a thing that was ever discussed. i guess a lot of stuff had some redundancy/HA so end users werent really affected.
I’m not sure if you’re including consumers in this. I have a gaming PC. When I get a message that friends are looking for a game, I want it to be on immediately so I can play.
Am I willing to do something about that? Like get a better drive, finally upgrade to UEFI, etc? No. But I want fast.
this is fairly true… ive not been exposed to end users not in some corp or organization environment…
It used to matter more, back when cold booting was way more common, and leaving your computer on was way less common, and people didn’t have a computer in their pockets for most computer tasks.
Kinda like how boot time on smartphones used to matter because people had to restart them fairly frequently.
When there is a thing you want to do, and you have to wait for a a stupid machine to get ready before you can do it, it sucks.
It’s one of those things that’s not important untill it is. I seem to recall a kernel panic when launching software for a video interview, and in that moment… yeah… i felt every second of boot-up time.
When computers took minutes to boot, it was annoying. In the days before computers had a suspend feature, you might be turning a computer on and off multiple times a day, and you would just have to wait a while before you could do anything. In the days of windows 95 and some of the subsequent releases, you would just expect to get the blue screen of death constantly, and keep having to reboot. Install something and have to reboot. Waiting on rebooting added up to quite a chunk of time.
These days, I reboot my pc once a week or less, and then it’s back up within a minute. So yeah, it doesn’t even bother me now because it’s such a non-issue. But that’s just because of all the progress that has been made in that area over the decades.
For a general purpose work machine, no. Even for a gaming desktop, probably not. For a gaming laptop, maybe, depending on your lifestyle.
For a gaming handheld? Yeah, definitely. You want a good battery-saving sleep mode, and a quick shutdown/startup as well.
The other scenario I can see is field work machines, for kiosks or task logging, especially if you need to change sites on a regular basis.
Server: Not really as long as it’s only a few minutes. Sure it was annoying to configure it the first time because windows wanted to reboot after installing the drivers for the usb stick and whatnot, but I’m paid by the hour regardless.
Desktop: I’ll turn it on and go get coffee. If it’s on by the time I get back it’s okay.
Laptop: I’m currently standing next to some industrial machine trying to fix it, if it’s not incredibly hot or loud it smells awful. The time it takes from pressing the power button to getting to debugging is really high on my priority list.
When it takes long yeah. Generally with a ssd boot times are pretty fast across the board but it also makes me expect a fast boot time. I expect a system to boot so fast now that there is little to no wait to the point powering up is not noticably slower than coming out of sleep. I get rather annoyed now if the os does not go by as fast as the bios screen. If a minute passes from pressing the button im like wtf. Again though I find most things can boot that fast now and its sorta unusual when they don’t. One thing I have been loving about not being on windows is I don’t seem to have to worry about various things getting put into start up automatically which would ruin my boot time on windows.
it didn’t matter to me until i got a PC which booted super fast
I use QubesOS and dom0 boot takes a while (haven’t been bothered to figure out why it waits till sys-whatever starts before dropping me into the login screen). The boot times for the VMs once the main boot is done matters cos that’s how long launching a program takes but that’s usually pretty quick.
I remember the days before fast boot, you’d sit there like it was punishment, while it counted ram, then if you hit a snag, you’re in for the big hurt
When my desktop took a bunch of minutes to boot I put ff and compilers etc in the auto-launch-at-boot which made it take even longer but started the PC before I got breakfast. Everything up and ready when I got back.
Then I got an SSD.
Now I’m on linux so I rarely switch the PC off at all…
Its very important in embedded applications. Think of kiosks or other customer facing software. The longer it takes to boot the longer its out of service before the reboot finishes. It is essentially the upper bound of recovery time after an error.
