startup question
R.L. Horn
lists at eastcheap.org
Fri Oct 27 14:05:07 PDT 2006
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.
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