Measuring Fedora's Boot Performance

Fedora Core 4 had a boot time of 52 seconds and a maximum disk throughput of 13 MB/s. Fedora Core 5 was also at 52 seconds but with a throughput of 29 MB/s. Fedora Core 6 had slowed down in our testing to 59 seconds (it did have more processes running at start-up than FC4 and FC5) while its disk throughput was high at 28MB/s.

Fedora 7 had crawled at start-up with a boot time of 87 seconds! It's maximum disk throughput had dropped to 15MB/s and there were even more processes running at start-up than Fedora Core 6. Fortunately, in Fedora 8 the boot time dramatically decreased and was back down to 51 seconds. Its throughput, however, was 12MB/s. The boot time for Fedora 9 Rawhide was 66 seconds. It's important to note that Rawhide/development versions of Fedora are slower than the official releases due to kernel debugging messages, etc being enabled. The maximum disk throughput had slumped to 8MB/s.