ive been using/managing/fixing computers and servers for 40+ years. from old AS400 to full on cloud bullshit. i can remember only a single time where boot time mattered… when microsofts DNS failures caused servers to take 15 minutes to boot… other than that there hasnt been a single time it has ever been a problem or discussed as an issue to be resolved.
so why the fuck is it constantly touted as some benefit!? it grinds my gears when i see anyone stating how fast their machine booted.
am i alone in this?
I remember the days before fast boot, you’d sit there like it was punishment, while it counted ram, then if you hit a snag, you’re in for the big hurt
When computers took minutes to boot, it was annoying. In the days before computers had a suspend feature, you might be turning a computer on and off multiple times a day, and you would just have to wait a while before you could do anything. In the days of windows 95 and some of the subsequent releases, you would just expect to get the blue screen of death constantly, and keep having to reboot. Install something and have to reboot. Waiting on rebooting added up to quite a chunk of time.
These days, I reboot my pc once a week or less, and then it’s back up within a minute. So yeah, it doesn’t even bother me now because it’s such a non-issue. But that’s just because of all the progress that has been made in that area over the decades.
I know it was quite popular to measure boot times when SSDs were first coming out because of the massive speed difference there was from HDDs. I think its just a fun/easy metric to measure and report on today. Most probably don’t care if its 10 or 20 seconds.
in the 80s/early 90s we used a directory listing to demonstrate how fast the machine was… when the pentiums started to hit, it finally listed faster than you could read.
it didn’t matter to me until i got a PC which booted super fast
When my desktop took a bunch of minutes to boot I put ff and compilers etc in the auto-launch-at-boot which made it take even longer but started the PC before I got breakfast. Everything up and ready when I got back.
Then I got an SSD.
Now I’m on linux so I rarely switch the PC off at all…
It didn’t matter to me until I had a laptop that booted super fast. And now it matters…
When it takes long yeah. Generally with a ssd boot times are pretty fast across the board but it also makes me expect a fast boot time. I expect a system to boot so fast now that there is little to no wait to the point powering up is not noticably slower than coming out of sleep. I get rather annoyed now if the os does not go by as fast as the bios screen. If a minute passes from pressing the button im like wtf. Again though I find most things can boot that fast now and its sorta unusual when they don’t. One thing I have been loving about not being on windows is I don’t seem to have to worry about various things getting put into start up automatically which would ruin my boot time on windows.
For some reason my PC recently started taking ages just to get to the UEFI logos.
So far it hasn’t bothered me enough to figure out why though.
On some devices with Linux suspend can still consume a lot of power, I’ve had some pain with this in the past with Void but runit boots quick so non-issue.
I suppose another perspective is encryption, when the device Is powered off. It’s going to be encrypted so there might be an extra degree of security there.
When I was performing dart analytics and teaching at the same time I would turn off my machine between classes just in case. But I still wanted it to boot fast because I’d have to then go and teach.
I don’t really care, but I’m just a simple man.
Server: Not really as long as it’s only a few minutes. Sure it was annoying to configure it the first time because windows wanted to reboot after installing the drivers for the usb stick and whatnot, but I’m paid by the hour regardless.
Desktop: I’ll turn it on and go get coffee. If it’s on by the time I get back it’s okay.
Laptop: I’m currently standing next to some industrial machine trying to fix it, if it’s not incredibly hot or loud it smells awful. The time it takes from pressing the power button to getting to debugging is really high on my priority list.
For large scale compute clusters with elastic load I absolutely care. The difference between one and five minutes of boot time when I ask for a hundred new instances to be provisioned is huge in terms of responsiveness to customer requests.
- nothing will take 5 minutes.
- build a queue of clean, suspended VMs if you need them that fast
I run massive, global kubernetes clusters in AWS for a company you’ve probably heard of. There is no queue of clean VMs–not like you’re thinking anyway. And provisioning a new node can take Too Long under not-all-that-uncommon scenarios.
The next best option is overprovisioning the cluster, but even 1% overhead has big costs at this scale.
For a server, IDK.
I used to care on the desktop. AM5 boots painfully slowly, which probably would have been an issue at some point. Now I rarely reboot, so I don’t care as much.
Only if its abysmal.
I care about not having slow boot time, but I don’t really care if it’s fast.
