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?
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 expect my laptop to be fast so if it’s boot time is 30 seconds, I’m now waiting 30 seconds. If I expected it to be longer I could go get a drink or something, but I’m expecting 5-10 seconds so any extra is fairly annoying.
I didn’t buy an m.2 SSD to have HDD waiting times.
For large scale compute clusters with elastic load I absolutely care. The difference between one and five minutes of boot time when I ask for a hundred new instances to be provisioned is huge in terms of responsiveness to customer requests.
- nothing will take 5 minutes.
- build a queue of clean, suspended VMs if you need them that fast
I don’t care that much on the desktop, though faster is always nice.
I do care on laptops, where it’s linked to time required to wake up from hibernation.
On some devices with Linux suspend can still consume a lot of power, I’ve had some pain with this in the past with Void but runit boots quick so non-issue.
I suppose another perspective is encryption, when the device Is powered off. It’s going to be encrypted so there might be an extra degree of security there.
When I was performing dart analytics and teaching at the same time I would turn off my machine between classes just in case. But I still wanted it to boot fast because I’d have to then go and teach.
people will not reboot their workstations if it takes more than 2-3 minutes. becomes a pain when months of updates are pending and theyre bitching about having to reboot to fix their issues.
reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.
reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.
No.
Only reboot if
needs-rebootingsays so.my clients are windows users.
For a server, IDK.
I used to care on the desktop. AM5 boots painfully slowly, which probably would have been an issue at some point. Now I rarely reboot, so I don’t care as much.
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.
I used to care when it took a long time. But now that it’s pretty fast I don’t care.
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.
Boot time isn’t as important to me as the time it takes to be ready for use. I notice this more on Windows machines where it gets to the desktop and it’s still fucking around with a bunch of stuff in the background for a minute or two.
I remember on my old XP machine I had to wait for the last taskbar icon to load before I knew it’d respond well. Super annoying.
oh yeah, fuck this shit, windows 11 is trash with this. hate rebooting my work laptop for this reason.
i used to care (about the long updates). then i realized they are paying me to wait for the garbage they force me to utilize. whatevs
My windows partition takes upwards of 2 minutes to actually be ready to do anything, my Linux partition is ready to rock ten seconds after I push the power button and four of those seconds are intentional delay to choose a boot disc.
I didn’t care about it before, but I sure do now. Booting into windows these days is torturous in comparison.
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.
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.
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.
I know it was quite popular to measure boot times when SSDs were first coming out because of the massive speed difference there was from HDDs. I think its just a fun/easy metric to measure and report on today. Most probably don’t care if its 10 or 20 seconds.
in the 80s/early 90s we used a directory listing to demonstrate how fast the machine was… when the pentiums started to hit, it finally listed faster than you could read.
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.
