The Impact Of HDD/SSD Performance On Linux Gaming

[caligula]

Heh, that's still better than Windows 10.
On a 5400 RPM drive it's just embarassing, it takes like a minute to show the login, and then another minute or so to stop lagging (i.e. still loading stuff) after it has reached desktop.

And this on a Lenovo Ideapad 310 (quadcore AMD apu) from 2015. Same hardware + SSD boots in less than 10 seconds on both Windows and OpenSUSE.

I could easily do even better, but didn't have time, only 5 minutes. It's sad that Ubuntu does so little configuration during the installation. It could detect all hardware and optimize the services. I mean seriously, disabling modem drivers and that closed firmware blob tool improved boot time by around 20-30 seconds. It should have seen that my integrated iGPU and ethernet based internet doesn't need either. It could also have deleted the extra language packages in the background after the first startup, not before rebooting to new OS. So sad.

[glasen]

So why didn't you do systemd-analyze plot? Manuals too overrated these days?

Why don't you ask Michael this question? I already know that "apt-daily" is to blame for this numbers and the time measured be "systemd-analyze" is not the true time the system is ready to use.

[starshipeleven]

I tried the latest ubuntu 7.10 on a 1,833 GHz Core 2 Duo with 5400 rpm HDD. I got 30 seconds. What does that tell you? Ok I cheated a bit, disabled apport, closed source firmware tool, modem manager (have broadband) and networkmanager. It's just, Ubuntu is a pile of bloat by default.

Heh, that's still better than Windows 10.
On a 5400 RPM drive it's just embarassing, it takes like a minute to show the login, and then another minute or so to stop lagging (i.e. still loading stuff) after it has reached desktop.

And this on a Lenovo Ideapad 310 (quadcore AMD apu) from 2015. Same hardware + SSD boots in less than 10 seconds on both Windows and OpenSUSE.

[starshipeleven]

39 seconds boot time on a ssd, thats awful!!
my system with a 850 evo ssd boots in ~10 seconds

This. My desktop with mechanical drives is up in like 45 seconds.
My laptop with Crucial MX100 SSD (512GB) is up in around 10 seconds too.

[caligula]

39 seconds boot time on a ssd, thats awful!!
my system with a 850 evo ssd boots in ~10 seconds

I tried the latest ubuntu 7.10 on a 1,833 GHz Core 2 Duo with 5400 rpm HDD. I got 30 seconds. What does that tell you? Ok I cheated a bit, disabled apport, closed source firmware tool, modem manager (have broadband) and networkmanager. It's just, Ubuntu is a pile of bloat by default.

[caligula]

The startup times which "systemd-analyze" produce are very misleading.
...
Never trust some numbers when you have not the slightest idea how these are produced.

So why didn't you do systemd-analyze plot? Manuals too overrated these days?

[glasen]

The startup times which "systemd-analyze" produce are very misleading. For example here are two my startup times reported by "systemd-analyse":

Startup finished in 6.367s (firmware) + 139ms (loader) + 2.587s (kernel) + 34.529s (userspace) = 43.624s

and

Startup finished in 6.312s (firmware) + 140ms (loader) + 2.565s (kernel) + 4.307s (userspace) = 13.327s

The strange thing is that both times GDM was ready in about 8s (stop watch) which means the second time is very precise when subtracting the firmware time.

So how does "systemd-analyze" produces the first number?

Ubuntu starts the service "apt-daily" every time the system boots for the first time each day. When i began to write this message my PC was started the first time on this day an "apt-daily.service" was started in background. My system was ready in about 8s and not 37s but "systemd-analyze" counted the running "apt-daily" service as a userspace program and added it the userspace time.

After the second boot "apt-daily" was not started and "systemd-analyze" reported the "correct" time for userspace (~7s for arriving in GDM).

As the german saying goes: "Wer misst, misst Mist!"
English translation: "Who measures measures rubbish!"

Never trust some numbers when you have not the slightest idea how these are produced.

[talby]

Maybe Ubuntu inherits from Debian to perform security updates automatically at startup. On my Laptops running Debian and SparkyLinux this slowed down the startup between 20 and 60 (!) seconds, because it could only be accomplished when network connection was up and repository server answering. As I am anyway daily checking for updates (manually), I disabled this behaviour and gained that even my 10 year old Laptops (with their old HDD) have startup times of only between 30 and 45 seconds (kernel startup around 6 sec, userspace around 30 sec, according to systemd-analyze).

Instead of testing with a fresh Ubuntu installation maybe first tune it at least a little bit, if Ubuntu herited the above mentioned from Debian:

systemctl disable [put here the following entries]
apt-daily-upgrade.service
apt-daily-upgrade.timer
apt-daily.service
apt-daily.timer
unattended-upgrades.service

[Cyber Killer]

From my gaming I know that ssd makes a world of difference over hdd when playing Torchlight 2. That game's level loading times are serious.

[useless]

I know, right? My laptop has a pretty slow SSD compared to a lot of others but Solus still boots in ~10 seconds usually. So something must've been wrong with Michael's SSD.

Maybe Ubuntu? Wrong setup? Here we have two desktop PCs with Samsung 850 EVO SSDs and a laptop with a 840 EVO; all of them boot in less than 10 sec.
This is from one PC with openSUSE:

Startup finished in 2.960s (kernel) + 1.164s (initrd) + 4.605s (userspace) = 8.730s

Funny thing is that the headline says: "... Performance On Linux Gaming" (Emphasis added).