The Other Issue With Ubuntu 11.10: Boot Speed

It was last month when I showed for many different systems, Ubuntu 11.10 is booting slower. A clean Ubuntu 11.10 install was noticeably slower than Ubuntu 11.04 and earlier releases, as measured by Bootchart. It did not matter whether the system was a desktop or notebook, an Intel or AMD CPU, or whether there was a solid-state drive or hard drive: Ubuntu 11.10 is booting slower. In the tests conducted with a near-final ISO of Ubuntu 11.10 from this week and last, this remains the case. From all the hardware available in many different configurations, I have not yet found a system that is booting faster with Ubuntu 11.10 over Ubuntu 11.04.

Even Ubuntu 11.10 in a virtual machine boots slower than Ubuntu 11.04. Here's the Bootchart results for clean installations (and set to auto-login) of every Ubuntu Linux release from 8.04 Hardy to 11.10 Oneiric from a 64-bit KVM guest. Each installation had rebooted at least three times with Bootchart enabled before recording the result. The guest each time was configured the same with access to four cores, 2GB of RAM, and a 8GB virtual disk. The host system had an Intel Core i7 720Q CPU, an Intel 160GB SSD, and 4GB of RAM.

Below are the Bootchart numbers for each release in its stock configuration.

Ubuntu 8.04: 18 seconds
Ubuntu 8.10: 16 seconds
Ubuntu 9.04: 9 seconds
Ubuntu 9.10: 51 seconds
Ubuntu 10.04: 10.41 seconds
Ubuntu 10.10: 9.60 seconds
Ubuntu 11.04: 5.80 seconds
Ubuntu 11.10: 6.76 seconds

The boot time for this KVM guest might have only increased by one second, but that's a 16% increase in boot time for this virtual machine that is backed by a speedy Intel SSD and a quad-core Intel Core i7 with Hyper Threading.

A 32-bit KVM-virtualized guest of Ubuntu 11.10 was also slower on the same Core i7 system.

Ubuntu 10.10: 9.28 seconds
Ubuntu 11.04: 5.61 seconds
Ubuntu 11.10: 7.64 seconds