On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, Kazuyuki Inanaga wrote:

> At 8:23 AM -0600 04.2.13, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> >
> >All those programs in userland that aren't running don't have anything
> >to do with boot up time.
>
> Thanks a lot.
> That my example was not good.
>
> 1.6.1 (GENERIC) on my Classic II ('030/16MHz, 10MB RAM, with FPU) takes
> more than 5min 30sec for booting up. (from "Boot Now" to "login:")
> It gets slowdown after the line "root file system type: ffs", especially
> it's very slow at:
>
> Building databases...
> Starting syslogd.
> Checking for core dump...
> save core: no core dump
> Mounting all filesystems...
> Clearing /tmp.
> Creating a.out runtime link editor directory cache.
> Checking quotas: done.
> Starting virecover.
> starting local daemons:.
> Updating motd.
>
> Can we control those things with kernel configuration? I don't think so.
> That is the reason I used the word "userland".

Well, you could remove the relevant scripts from "/etc/rc.d",
but if you do that, many things will no longer work correctly.
The "databases" are needed by "ps", for example.

Perhaps the real problem is, it's very slow to write to the disk.
With 10MB, you have essentially zero buffer cache, no matter how you
tweak. How is it at copying files and such, once booted? Is the disk
write cache on -- "scsictl sd0 getcache"? If not, it would surely be
worthwhile to turn it on, with "scsictl sd0 setcache rw save".

> > You may benefit from tweaking the buffer cache parameters. The
> > default for vm.execmin of 5%, for example, works out to only 500Kb
> > on a machine with 10Mb of RAM, which is too small to have any effect.
> > Try bumping that to, say, 8% to 20%.  Like so:
> >
> >     echo vm.execmin=10 >> /etc/sysctl.conf
> >
> > and see what difference that makes to bootup time.
>
> I'm sorry, no difference is found. (an error is less than 1sec.)
>
> vm.execmin=5          5' 36.38"    5' 36.57"
> vm.execmin=8          5' 37.07"    5' 36.25"
> vm.execmin=10        5' 37.15"    5' 37.19"
> vm.execmin=15        5' 37.37"    5' 37.00"
> vm.execmin=20        5' 36.96"    5' 37.46"
>
> Why? Do you have any idea what I did misunderstanding?

Oh well. It seems I guessed wrong, and swapping isn't the problem.
It was worth a shot.

Frederick