1w ago

do people really care about boot time?

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?

61 comments

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.

For a server? Absolutely doesn't matter as long as it's not preposterous. Turning a server on can be done entirely linearly for almost every server and the slowdown is irrelevant.
For a desktop? Almost irrelevant, but it should be fast enough so you don't get bored enough to actually start doing something else.
Laptop? I actually like those to boot fast. I'm much more likely to pull one out to do something real quick, and so my laptop booting in a few seconds makes standing with my laptop on my arm to send a file real quick as I'm going somewhere feasible.
- These production clusters I have at work are a nightmare to (re)boot. They run in a rather hostile environment, so sometimes we need to take it all down due to external factors. The rule of thumb is that it takes and hour to shut down and two hours to start.
  There are 6 servers, and they have to start (and stop) in the correct order. Each takes around 10 minutes to boot, so if all is to be done correctly, it's roughly 40 minutes. The rest of the startup procedure is checking internal stuff as well as interfacing with various robotics and misc.
  It's possible to gamble a bit, though: start 1, wait a bit and then start the next one, hoping that they come online in the correct order. But sometimes it doesn't and this gamble results in having to shut down everything and start over.
  ....If you follow procedure, that is. I know the system well enough that I can start all machines at the same time and just interrogate and sort out any misbehaving components, thus cutting down the startup time a lot.
  So yeah, while the system takes a lot of time to start, it's mostly due to procedural reasons. In theory it could all be booted and ready in~15 minutes if we make the startup sequence more forgiving.
  
  That's brutal. Is it clustered data storage of some sort? All the most offensive startup and shutdown sequence I've seen are giant storage systems.
- Isn't your laptop use case the reason that sleep exists?
  
  Typically, yes. I have a tendency to use sleep when I'm coming back in some set period of time, and power off when I'm "going".
  If I'm walking to a different room I'll close the lid and stick in under my arm which makes it sleep, or going to the bathroom or cooking dinner or something. If I'm leaving and sticking it in my bag, I tend to power it off.
  It's a combination of not wanting the battery to die in sleep mode, and not wanting to put a heat generating device in my bag even if it's greatly reduced.
  Thinking about it, powering down also drops the drive encryption keys from memory so it's arguably more secure. Not in the least why I do it that way, but it's an advantage now that I think about it.
  Since I'm more likely to use the laptop like a super-phone, I appreciate it when it becomes usable fast regardless of what state I left it in.
  
  Isn’t your laptop use case the reason that sleep exists?
  I don't want my laptop to have its battery constantly being drained.
  I have it set up to suspend for 10 minutes, and if it's still suspended, hibernate.
  That lets me move it from location to location quickly for short moves, but also means that if I don't open the thing up again for a week or two, it's fine.

how are you over 40 and you don't remember the boot times before SSDs?
- its not that things didnt take a bit longer, its that i never cared between a minute or 5. ive never been a part of a conversation where a customer or coworker lamented boot times at all. it just never mattered. no one ever said 'gee how can we make this faster' or 'if only there were a product that booted faster we would prefer to buy that!'
  even when i worked in 911/emergency services, it wasnt a thing that was ever discussed. i guess a lot of stuff had some redundancy/HA so end users werent really affected.

There's diminishing returns. I don't think people care much as long as it's under a minute. Between 1-3 minutes they care a bit. 3-10 minutes and it becomes tedious. 10+ and people get very irritated.
If you've ever worked on a corporate system, that last category is very common no matter what the hardware is.
As for people bragging, that's all it is. They're saying it's so fast it can do [meaningless task] in an impressively short amount of time. Presumably, this translates into something more meaningful but harder to benchmark. For instance, they tell you it boots in 5 seconds because that means it can reopen all of their Chrome tabs in 30 seconds.

I expect my laptop to be fast so if it's boot time is 30 seconds, I'm now waiting 30 seconds. If I expected it to be longer I could go get a drink or something, but I'm expecting 5-10 seconds so any extra is fairly annoying.
I didn't buy an m.2 SSD to have HDD waiting times.

It used to matter more, back when cold booting was way more common, and leaving your computer on was way less common, and people didn't have a computer in their pockets for most computer tasks.
Kinda like how boot time on smartphones used to matter because people had to restart them fairly frequently.
When there is a thing you want to do, and you have to wait for a a stupid machine to get ready before you can do it, it sucks.

It's one of those things that's not important untill it is. I seem to recall a kernel panic when launching software for a video interview, and in that moment... yeah... i felt every second of boot-up time.

My windows partition takes upwards of 2 minutes to actually be ready to do anything, my Linux partition is ready to rock ten seconds after I push the power button and four of those seconds are intentional delay to choose a boot disc.
I didn't care about it before, but I sure do now. Booting into windows these days is torturous in comparison.

I find it rather amusing that big servers are optimized to never fail with redundant pdus and fans and the like but as soon as you have to restart such a device, prepare for 10-20 minute downtime.
My take is: before we had ssds so that a shitty configured windows pc could take up to 5-10 mins to boot, that really was a problem. Nowadays, especially were many devices use suspend instead of shutdown and are much faster, not any more.
On the other hand, my fucking smart tv takes 2 minutes to boot and i hate it.
- My TV does this thing where for 3 seconds after you press power, it will let you cycle through the inputs (but you can't see anything because the screen is still off). Then it prevents you from doing anything with a message "powering on" for like 10 seconds. Then the input button opens a menu that lets you choose inputs.
  So when I turn it on, I mash the input button trying to change it to the thing I want before it starts "powering on." So annoying.

I'm not sure if you're including consumers in this. I have a gaming PC. When I get a message that friends are looking for a game, I want it to be on immediately so I can play.
Am I willing to do something about that? Like get a better drive, finally upgrade to UEFI, etc? No. But I want fast.
- this is fairly true... ive not been exposed to end users not in some corp or organization environment..

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.

Working on Sun heavy iron, boot time was excuciating. We'd add RAM to a fully pupulated E3000 and then waiy 40 minutes before the first diagnostics appeared on the terminal.
That wasn't technically boot time, but the OBP equivalent of POST.
Honestly, OS boot time has never been an issue for me.

it didn't matter to me until i got a PC which booted super fast

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.

I like a properly fast boot time, but a couple of minutes is tolerable. Much more than that and it feels annoyingly slow.
What is truly annoying though is when I have to do something that should be quick but requires booting a computer on my work's network. I got back into the office once and literally had to wait 20 minutes when all I wanted to do was to print out one jolly document and go home - I guarantee you I cared about boot time that day...

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.

It didn't matter to me until I had a laptop that booted super fast. And now it matters...

For a general purpose work machine, no. Even for a gaming desktop, probably not. For a gaming laptop, maybe, depending on your lifestyle.
For a gaming handheld? Yeah, definitely. You want a good battery-saving sleep mode, and a quick shutdown/startup as well.
The other scenario I can see is field work machines, for kiosks or task logging, especially if you need to change sites on a regular basis.

I used to care when it took a long time. But now that it's pretty fast I don't care.

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.

people will not reboot their workstations if it takes more than 2-3 minutes. becomes a pain when months of updates are pending and theyre bitching about having to reboot to fix their issues.
reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.
- reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.
  No.
  Only reboot if needs-rebooting says so.
  
  no, my clients are windows users. if something feels off, restart and see if it fixes it. there's so much shit happening in the background, something could have updated and either didn't or failed to restart a service, now something else doesn't work.
  do you wait until your tires blow before replacing them? or preemptively when the tread is worn down too much?

I don't care that much on the desktop, though faster is always nice.
I do care on laptops, where it's linked to time required to wake up from hibernation.

I don't really care, but I'm just a simple man.

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.

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 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 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

Whatever time I'd get by tuning my start-up would be dwarfed by the BIOS and grub startup dance. I only really reboot when I need to test a kernel.

Its very important in embedded applications. Think of kiosks or other customer facing software. The longer it takes to boot the longer its out of service before the reboot finishes. It is essentially the upper bound of recovery time after an error.

I think they're just new boot goofin'.

I use QubesOS and dom0 boot takes a while (haven't been bothered to figure out why it waits till sys-whatever starts before dropping me into the login screen). The boot times for the VMs once the main boot is done matters cos that's how long launching a program takes but that's usually pretty quick.

It shouldn't feel forever. I like that the longest part of booting my PC is the grub selection for my dual boot setup. I have an older laptop that takes about 2 minutes to boot. Not a deal breaker, but a noticeable delay.
I don't really care.
But it being snappy sure feels good. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 feature making the setup unattractive, 5 being indifference, 10 being super important, booting fast is a 6.

I don’t remember the last time I rebooted by laptop. Of course it doesn’t run Windows either.

Yes, a single setting on the BIOS for AM5 changed my boot time from ~80 seconds to about 25 seconds which in turn greatly improved my life and cured my depression. I'd say its something worth thinking about if its unusually long

I don't care about how long it takes to boot up, but I do care how long it takes from login to the desktop environment being usable.
Dealing with servers, I'm used to long boot up times since the low-level lifecycle management takes forever. But, once it's booted, I expect it to be ready to go. I have no patience for "Just a moment...." or "Getting things ready" after I enter my credentials. All that shit should have been taken care of during the boot up.
Thankfully, I mostly use Linux at home/work, so that's less of an issue, but it does make it all the worse when I have to remote into a Windows server.
- The worst is when windows doesn't even show that it's doing anything but is still hogging 100% cpu and most of the ram for some random background service for several minutes after booting.
  
  Lol, yup. The ol' .NET Optimizer background task.
  At a prior job, one of the junior admins updated the master image for our VDI linked-clone desktops. They snapped and deployed that without waiting for that background task to complete. The next day, when people started logging in and the desktop pools started spinning up, we got 70+ complaints that every virtual desktop was un-usably slow. Those were coming in as we were watching our performance monitors say almost every VMware host was at max CPU.

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's a nice thing, but not a metric that I'm gonna brag about.

Well, (potential) customers do care about quite a few completely useless metrics, or ta least meaningless ones. Exactly like they do with their photography gear. Marketing departments need those things to sell new device, right? ;)

I guess I do. I put the computer (a desktop) into suspend most nights so that it's pretty much up and running as soon as I turn it on the next day.
Even so, rebooting doesn't take that long. 30 seconds tops. Definitely not enough time to visit the bathroom or make a hot drink.
But the advantages to suspend are that it's quick and all my programs are as I left them. A reboot undoes most of that.
Yes, hibernating is also an option to keep open programs, but why do that when it can be quicker?
My only real concern with putting the machine into suspend is if there's a power cut and things end up in a weird state or I lose work because programs weren't closed properly, but then, that could happen at any point when I'm using it too.

I care about not having slow boot time, but I don't really care if it's fast.

The only times I cared about boot times was:
When BIOS/UEFI goes by too fast and I can't hit the boot menu key fast enough.
When I got my current computer back in 2022, I went from booting from HDD, to NVMe SSD over PCI-E 4.
- ha, i do remember the days of the boot menu being too fast to catch what the keystroke is, or hit the keys fast enough to trigger the bios.. too fast!!

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