My desktop seemed slow. It is four years old and faced a fair amount of criticism from my family. I decided to buy a new one. Moore's law is supposed to still hold but I found that the extra performance is via more cores. Each core is not much faster. Hence, the new desktop may not be any faster, at least, for booting and signing in. Besides, what would I do with the older one?

I had installed Fedora when I bought the system. Since then I have been upgrading the system. Could something have gone wrong? I freed a partition and installed a fresh copy of Fedora 17 on it. The new installation was much snappier. The boot time as shown by systemd-analyze came down from 72 sec to 27 sec!

However, the comparison wasn't fair. The original installation had a lot of services installed on it. Removing the additional services reduced the boot time to 45 sec. The kernel and the initramfs timings were about the same.

What was the difference? There may be some issues related to repeated upgrades of the distribution, which are not the supported methods. While searching for differences, I did find an explanation of why the ethernet interface was still named eth0 and not em0 as per the default Fedora installation. During the upgrades, an additional package, biosdevname, was introduced which was ignored during the upgrades. No package required it; so, its use is optional. Furthermore, device name difference was not relevant as far as performance was concerned.

Disk fragmentation can have an impact on performance. While de-fragmentation is not supposed to be a necessity on Linux, various upgrades and experimentations may have seriously fragmented the root partition. Backing up the root partition, reformatting and restoring it reduced the boot time to 34 sec.

Solid State Disk as Root

There was a parallel approach. I had been fascinated by articles about the dropping solid stated disk prices. Unfortunately, the local vendors had no idea or quoted a price which was still high. Recently, I found an online store offering 60GB at prices not too far above the US prices. In a remarkable coincidence, the SSD disk was delivered to me the same day as I read "Get thee behind me, Satan" comment by Linus Torvalds on slashdot.org.

SSD disk behaves just like a SATA disk. So, installation and using it as an additional disk was not a problem. However, it would not boot from the SSD disk. It was obviously a hardware limitation of my old desktop. The workaround was to create a boot partition on a conventional disk and have the root partition on SSD. The result was a remarkable improvement in the responsiveness of the system.. Systemd-analyze showed the new boot time as 14 sec. This figure is even more remarkable when we notice that the kernel and initramfs timing is still the same as original, which is about 7 seconds. So, the user-space boot time has come down from 38 sec to 27 sec after de-fragmentation to 7 sec with SSD!

Bootchart

A very useful utility for identifying boot performance is the bootchart package. It collects the boot data and prepares a beautiful, detailed chart, bootchart.png in /var/log directory. Unlike the systemd-analyze, this includes the start of the display manager. This is the time that matters to the user. With SSD, bootchart gives the time as 26 sec when the login screen is ready. The corresponding timing for SATA root disk is 56 sec originally and 41 sec after de-fragmentation. The difference between the two types of disks can be seen from the following table:

Cummulative Time	SSD Root	SATA Root	SATA Root Restored
CPU Time	24 sec	29 sec	28 sec
IO Time	44 sec	343 sec	177 sec
Elapsed Time	26 sec	56 sec	41 sec

The conclusion is obvious. I/O time is the most significant variable in reducing boot time. Benefit of no rotational delay and minimal, uniform access time in a SSD disk gives a new life to an old system.

A sixty GB SSD is a cost effective option in a desktop as it can be used for root and home. Multimedia and other large files can be on the existing SATA or IDE hard disk. This investment is likely to result in a better performance than replacing the desktop. Unless, of course, your brand new desktop relies exclusively upon SSD.

My next project is to refresh my netbook. It may be soon as more options for 120GB SSD are becoming available in India and prices are likely to become comparable to the US prices.