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?
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.
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.
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.
Personally I’m not sure I really shut down my laptop. Only restart as required. But now I think about it, boot time is important for restarts!
True! I tend to power off if I use the software button, and suspend if I close the lid. I think it’s the difference between “packing up” and pausing for a minute.
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.
You nailed it. Each server has 36 hard drives forming three RAIDs. These 18 RAIDs form a disaster-tolerant beegfs volume of 1.6PB.
On top of that, there’s a bunch of highly specialized geophysical software, an oracle database, and misc mundane services.