startup question

[R.L. Horn]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Dave Henderson wrote:

> My project is working with older hardware (667mhz cpu, 128mb RAM, 10gb 
> hard drive).

I'd consider that to be almost uncomfortably modern.  Particularly the 
gigantic hard drive.  :-)

>  I am trying to get X to load as fast as possible.  I currently have a 
> base installation of Debian Sarge 3.1 installed with the 
> x-window-system-core (4.3.0) package installed

That smells like XFree.  Naughty, naughty.

> As I said above, I am trying to get X to load as fast as possible. 
> What components can I remove from the system to speed it up and what 
> will be the result of removing those components.

By current standards X is pretty darn tight and should generally come up 
with some alacrity.  FWIW, I just timed it at <3 seconds from disk cache 
on a 1.8GHz Sempron (including running FVWM, xterm, rclock, xload, and 
xosview) with the xorg 1.1.0 server.  At a guess, I'd say that loading the 
server and its attendant libraries from disk adds no more than 3-4 seconds 
(it's not a particularly fast drive).

I've run relatively recent versions of X -- i.e. XFree 4 -- on a 200MHz 
Pentium and still the major bottleneck is disk access time.

About all I can think of to speed things up is to avoid loading 
unnecessary modules and, maybe, paring down the font path (though I 
haven't noticed that either makes much of a difference).

If you're seeing long delays, you should try running the server by itself 
(that is, just run "X," maybe with appropriate "-screen," etc. options). 
It should come up pretty quickly, though some video drivers might be a 
little pokey (the R300 ATI driver, for example, takes about 25 seconds to 
get going from a cold start on the abovementioned Sempron box).

Broken network configurations can slow down or otherwise screw up 
authority file generation (as when startx runs hostname).

Once you see the "grey screen" X is up and running.  Any delays thereafter 
are most likely related to the window manager or whatever else you're 
running at startup time.