Why Do Computers Take So Long to Boot Up? 975
An anonymous reader writes "Computers take too long to boot up, and it doesn't make sense to me. Mine takes around 30 seconds; it is double or triple that for some of my friends' computers that I have used. Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV? 99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to Windows XP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results. Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again. Or am I wrong? Why haven't companies made it a priority to have 'instant on' desktops and laptops?"
fast booting TVs ? (Score:5, Interesting)
My new HDTV takes about a minute to boot. Something about an ATI bios
IBM's "Rapid Resume" (Score:1, Interesting)
The problems I recall it having for certain wer that the time to dump to disk was waaaaay too long, and I don't think it was compatible with FAT32, among other issues. Anyone else remember this thing?
Maybe it's just Windows XP? (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless, NetBSD is the fasted of the three. It takes a little over 6 seconds from power-on to the login screen. FreeBSD takes 11 seconds. Solaris is a bit longer, clocking in a 14 seconds. I know these times because I was curious of this question as well, and so I did the timings. All three systems are basically the default installs, plus whatever initialization file changes there have been from installing various pieces of software.
Solaris does start into X, so that may be why it takes longer. Still, adding the 2 or so seconds it starts to get X running, NetBSD and FreeBSD are still less than Solaris.
Re:fast booting TVs ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Windows does a lot of writes when booting (Score:5, Interesting)
Valid point (Score:4, Interesting)
Some will say hibernation gives the same facility, but (at least with Windows) a clean boot needs to be done fairly often (when using a Windows development box, I reboot it daily).
A history of startup time (Score:5, Interesting)
In the beginning, say from Edison's development of the electric lighting system, through the invention of the fractional-horsepower motor which enabled the development of home appliances such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines, most things started up in a fraction of a second.
Then came vacuum-tube-based electronics, which took a minute or two to warm up.
Then came the "solid state" revolution, and, once again, things started up instantly. WIth the exception of television sets, which had a vacuum-tube-based "picture tubes" in them. However, manufacturers soon developed circuits that kept a small amount of current flowing to keep the filament partially warm while the set was "off," producing "instant-on" televisions.
Early hobbyist computers were instant-on, too. Before diskette drives were common, the machine had everything it needed to boot stored in ROM and was up displaying some kind of welcome prompt within a fraction of a second. Even when the serpent entered Eden in the form of "operating systems," startup was quick. When you turned on an 48K Apple ][+ with a diskette drive and spiffy Apple DOS 3.3, there was a brief "whish" as the disk spun and loaded a few K of code into the processor, and there you were.
It seems to me to be lazy design that says that booting consists of more than loading code into RAM and establishing state for the internal hardware. I have no idea why OSes must churn away for big fractions of a minute _running_ code. Why can't it just load a snapshot of the desired final state of RAM?
What really gripes me is that lately Windows and Mac OS X have taken to presenting an empty _illusion_ of a faster startup. What seems to be happening is that all the minute-long processes still churn away, but the processes that present the UI run in parallel. The result is that the visible desktop gets into a displayable and interactive state quickly. But while the UI seems to be ready, nothign else is... particularly anything to do with the local network. If you actually try to do anything on that desktop, you still encounter minute-long delays.
Gotta mention the obligatory Steve Jobs story here (Score:5, Interesting)
The story goes that the engineer working on the boot sequence for the original Mac was working late one night when Steve Jobs wanders past and asks how long the thing takes - the engineer is pretty happy that he's gotten it down to around 30 seconds (or however long it was) and that's probably good enough. Jobs then comments that they'll probably sell at least a million of these things - and each one will probably be booted a couple of times a day - and the machines will last maybe five years - so if he can save just one second more from the bootup time - that's equivelent to 113 years from the lives of Mac owners. So if you can save just one more second - that's like saving someone's life.
Talk about pressure!
But it's a serious point. The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them. Someone should take this seriously.
30 Seconds? (Score:4, Interesting)
I work for a large Fortune 500 company which does IT consulting. My work-issue laptop comes with a lot of baggage, including anti-virus, anti-spyware, automatic backup & disaster recovery, a special system update program, et cetera, et cetera.
How bad is it? It's like this: I can start my computer, and within about a minute, I get a standard XP pro login screen. After entering my username and password, I immediately get up and walk away, down a flight of stairs, out the door, and about a hundred yards to our campus cafeteria, where I'll buy a coffee. By the time I get back, my coffee is cool enough to drink, and my laptop is usually in a useable state.
Re:Hibernate (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hibernate (Score:1, Interesting)
And you run Windows?? (Queue the "you must be a moron if you have to reboot..." comments)
Seriously, though, I have to reboot my work machine a couple of times per day. Is it because I'm a moron? Possibly. It could also be the fact that my machine is locked down tight (disallowing me to diagnose it myself), and that even though I submitted the thing to Desktop Support countless times for random memory errors, the thing still isn't stable (even though they claim it's fixed). I used to think that they'd *want* to fix these productivity issues to save money, but then I realized that it's probably cheaper for them to tell me to work longer hours (I'm salaried). Whenever possible, I try to leave my laptop running overnight. However, since I work at multiple sites, I'm usually forced to turn it off. It's not uncommon for it to take me 20-30 minutes per day to start up my machine (I usually have to reboot many, many times before I can avoid the memory error). Desktop support has "fixed" it several times now. Begging them to reload it has gone on deaf ears.
To be fair, I suppose I don't have to restart my home machines too often, unless I install an update or some software (still annoying). I wish I could work from home, but they tell me it's a security risk. Better to waste time rebooting I suppose. (For the curious, this is a Fortune 500 company.)
Re:I'm surprised no one has mentioned it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Slow? My ordinary, everyday IDE drives can read over 60 megabytes per second. That could fill my PC's entire memory in about fifteen seconds.
I suspect the real problem may be that the operating system is still paging in small parts of DLLs and programs rather than loading them all in one go. Loading 4k pages one at a time made sense when the operating system was a couple of megabytes, but when you're loading a hundred megabytes of crap off the disk just to get to the desktop, you'd be much better to load the entire thing in one go; disk seek times have improved by a factor of two or three in the same time that disk read speeds have increased by maybe a factor of a hundred.
Does Windows still do that?
I remember when. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Today I have an HP Jornada 820 built in 1999. It runs Windows CE, and it turns on faster than anything. You hit the on/off button and you are either on or off just like that. --Best of all, it holds open all of your documents and programs exactly as you left them. I feel confident not saving stuff because it's so rock-steady reliable. The little critter is run on Flash memory; no hard drives.
My PC. . ? Well now. . , that beast is slow. Very slow.
I thought electrons moved at the speed of light, so what's the hold up? I refuse to blame the hard drives; those things are usually faster than Flash memory. So what's up? Bloat-ware? Too much hardware to configure? Poor programming? All of the above?
I don't know, but I suspect that if engineers had their act together and were not constrained by the ridiculous way of doing things which are currently in place, we'd have much better machines available.
-FL
Re:TVs don't need to do very much (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hum (Score:2, Interesting)
How many could it save... (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps those lifetimes aren't wasted by necessity but by negligence, laziness, and choice.
Re:Errr.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I remember using something closer to what the story is talking about, on the Amiga of all places; FastBoot [aminet.net] had you boot normally, then save a snapshot of the system at the end of the startup-sequence. Future boots would use this snapshot, which you generally didn't want to update at each shutdown -- you got 2-3s boot times, but each boot was clean. It worked surprisingly well for a scary hack
Re:Gotta mention the obligatory Steve Jobs story h (Score:3, Interesting)
The bottom line is that the fraction of wasted time stays the same no matter how many people you consider. I hate it when people try to prove a point not worth proving by considering a large population. (That's not what you were doing, it's what Steve was doing. I'm criticizing his and other's logic, not your post.) It's usually an argument used by alarmists to try to get something shutdown (ironically enough). For example, did you know that every year HUNDREDS of lives would be saved if we outlawed backyard pools? How can you let hundreds of people die?!? Well, if a hundred people die in America from something, I consider that an incredibly safe activity. Anyway, to bring it back to topic, I rather enjoy the down time I spend waiting for my PC to boot. It's like a free few minutes where nobody expects anything from you.
Sleep vs. Hibernate, and Firefox memory-leaks (Score:3, Interesting)
The big delay in returning from either of these modes is waiting for wireless 802.11g internet connection to wake up and set all its parameters correctly, get an IP address from the WAP, etc. If I know I'm going into my office, I can avoid that by turning off the wireless before closing the lid, and Ethernet is finally smart enough to just ask for DHCP every time it gets connected or wakes up.
The other issue I have is that I normally use a VPN to connect to work, and the VPN tunnel doesn't like getting shut down and restarted, especially with a different IP address, so I still have to re-authenticate by typing in my security token code to the VPN client.
Re:A history of startup time (Score:2, Interesting)
Either EFI or LinuxBIOS would be a huge improvement over any PC BIOS, in terms of speed and manageability. Those BIOS engineers... yeah.
Another problemis the hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
This means that the OS must upload the firmware on a restart, or full hibernation. While it is conceivable that a system could be implemented to do this, and leave the device in a conistant state, it sounds like a tedius, error prone setup, that is likely to cause no end of problems.
Of course, you could do away with the problem by making us all pay an extra quater-cent for a few k of flash, like a sensible hardware vendor.....
Re:Hibernate (Score:4, Interesting)
Vista's lack of EFI support is a real sign of MS's misplaced priorities, imho.
Re:hum (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, it should be noted that there IS a way to have Windows leave the hibernation file alone unless you tell it to hibernate again; that is, a hibernate once, resume many kind of situation. It's a trick often used when building a car PC. You get the system to the point where you'd want the system to start from, then tell it to hibernate. From then on, it'll resume from that spot. If you can get your system to work properly with hibernation, it's just about as fast as you'll ever get it to boot.
Not all true... (Score:3, Interesting)
Come on. Look square at the issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is old-school linear thinking we've inherited.
There is no technical reason that a computer could not wake up, verify the keyboard, memory, hd, mouse and display are the same (in a few microseconds, probably) and be up and responding very well to the user, while (new concept, brace yourselves) the computer carefully brings up other hardware subsystems and makes them available as they become functional. You could be in a word processor, graphics editor, all manner of things that don't require more hardware until you do something like print or attempt to access the network; if those subsystems are not ready when you try to use them, the design would allow for [establishing hardware, wait or cancel] and there you have it.
There is no problem whatsoever with plug and play concepts coexisting with fast usability other than current design shortcomings end users have been forced to live with. The computer is running as soon as the HD is spinning, memory sized, and the video card is on and the KB and mouse work. Just because current operating systems don't let you begin working at that time isn't a reflection on plug and play as a concept, it's a reflection of linear thinking that descends from old single tasking systems like early DOS.
The idea that a 2...3 GHz 32 or 64 bit CPU cannot bring itself to decent usability in under a second is one that is silly right on the face of it except in that common systems are using old school thinking and layering more and more crap on top of that thinking. There is not a thing in the world that says drivers can't be loaded on demand, or after usability from boot, or separately. Nothing.
Re:Errr.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not very familiar with CRT technology, but I've always wondered why CRT power specifications [dell.com] so often have quite high values for 'standby power'. I know a monitor will return to displaying an image from standby faster than it will from power off, but I'm not really sure how the two start processes are different.
I don't suppose you can enlighten me?
Thanks!
Re:Windows does a lot of writes when booting (Score:3, Interesting)
You may want to disable it and use the software supplied with your wireless adapter even if you do. On my machine, WZC causes ~100ms delays during which no packets can be transmitted or received every time it refreshes its list of available networks, which happens once per minute whether you're looking at the list or not. Absolute hell if you're trying to use VOIP or play games. Annoying if you're using ssh or vnc.
Re:hum (Score:1, Interesting)
Do everyone and yourself a favor and just admit you have nerdish and homosexual tendencies. The truth will set you free!
Slow XP boot - it's the XP networking (Score:2, Interesting)