6 ms·
> the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing. Honest question/clarification, is that... considered fast? My
by katastic 9y ago
> the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing.
Honest question/clarification, is that... considered fast?
My DOS system used to boot that fast. A C64 is almost instant. And my old ~2013 Chromebook boots in ~7 seconds into Linux with an eMMC drive (slower than an SSD but still fairly fast). It's only got 2 GB of RAM so when it hits swap it'll bog to a standstill so it's often faster just to hit the reset key than try and recover.
- isostatic 9y agoI don't understand modern swap. Ok you can page out a few MB you don't use on a regular basis, but any swapping kills the machine. I'd far rather OOMkiller killed off non active tabs (there's almost always a web browser using the memory on a desktop), or run away apache processses, than try to swap. For that reason I never configure swap on any of my machines.
- zzzcpan 9y agoThe regular old swap is slightly technologically behind today's needs. It is supposed to be replaced by things like zram and zswap, that don't kill the machine.
- greenleafjacob 9y agoSwap can be useful for batch jobs that need lots of memory to run but the working set is small. Then you can keep the physical memory for the working set and the disk swap for the (larger) whole set of memory.
- Avamander 9y agoMy experience has been that if the usage grows slowly and the system is instructed to actually load stuff to swap I can safely go to the limits of my swap and physical ram space without any freezes and nothing dying (although ofc taking more time, but the alternative is not using the software at all).
- barrkel 9y agoIt doesn't make sense on a server, but on a desktop, unless it's actively thrashing, swapping is normally fine. It's not cool to kill off the user's possibly unsaved work with a few random process terminations. There are other, more cooperative ways of doing it. For example, always save enough state to restore after a kill when becoming a background task. But it's also more work.
- sebcat 9y agoThe boot time bottleneck (if it can be called that) on my old ABC80 was waiting for the CRT to warm up. The prompt was already there and fading into view a couple of seconds after power-up. Booting from ROM is one thing. Loading something from tape, that's another story.
- orionblastar 9y agoThe Commodore 64 Kernal is in a ROM so it is a fast boot for the OS, but the 1541 floppy drive is slow unless you use Fastload or Jiffydos, etc. I think some C64 units had a spare socket for GEOS the GUI made for the C64.
- katastic 9y agoWhile I agree, it should be noted ROM is actually incredibly slow by today's standards.
- krylon 9y agoMy work laptop - admittedly not a high-end machine - takes about two minutes from power-on to login-prompt. I've seen Windows machines - without SSDs - that had tons and tons and tons of software installed on them, that took 10 to 15 minutes from power-on to login. Compared to that, <30 seconds is very fast. SSDs have been a real game-changer, though. My home desktop takes less than 10 seconds from boot manager to display manager. I used to be very patient, now I kind of regret all the time I spent waiting for some computer to boot. ;-) The C64 boots off ROM, IIRC? So that is kind of cheating. ;-) But yes, I had a C64, too, the delay between switching it on and the machine being usable was too low to notice.