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Asked: 2014-12-16 20:07:03 +0800 CST

Significant increase in booting time after update in Ubuntu 14.04

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Did anyone else notice a sudden increase in booting time after a recent update (maybe, 2 or 3 weeks ago) in Ubuntu 14.04. After showing the Ubuntu logo, there is a black screen that takes a lot of time to finish. After that, Ubuntu loads the desktop and everything runs as usual.

This is happening in a laptop Dell Inspiron 1545 (Pentium 2GHz and 8GB RAM).

I have installed bootchart and this is the image produced:

enter image description here

If I'm reading the output correctly, it takes 1 minute and 28 seconds to load.

I'm almost certain that I haven't installed anything recently. Does anyone know what could be the cause?

UPDATE

It takes 55 seconds to show the black screen and lasts 43 seconds until the desktop appears. A few seconds before that, it is possible to move the cursor. It looks similar to the interval with low CPU use in the upper graph from the bootchart output.

14.04

3 Answers

  1. Thanks for posting the boot chart. I'm no expert but I noticed these issues:

    • Toward the start of the boot, there's a fsck followed by a mount operation that is taking a long time (over 20 seconds). A fair bit of later stuff seems to be waiting for this operation.

    • Further on in the boot, there is what looks like gpu-manager running a "find" operation that is taking a long time. I don't know why this would be, but a fair bit of later stuff (including lightdm, the graphical desktop) is waiting on this to finish.

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  2. All the files needed until you boot to desktop might be scattered or at-least away from start of the partition which happened while your system was getting upgraded, since new files are written to disk and after that old files are remove(of-course its done so that you can revert back if upgrade is not successful) this way new files are written away from start of partition. It takes more time to fetch those files. To reduce this time you have to reallocate the data back. I don't know a straight forward way to do this, but it can be done by installing e4rat(which is experimental). I tried e4rat recently on ubuntu 14.04 my boot time decreased by 10secs. if you want you can try from here

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  3. In my case it was a user issue:

    I experienced the same problem, also on 14.04 installed on an ssd drive. It used to take 10 seconds to show a functional desktop and then it took 10 seconds to show a black screen with a pointer and another 30 seconds to show desktop.

    Try to create another user and set this user to autologin. In my case it reduced boot time back to 9.5 seconds.

    Now I will copy my old settings/files to new user. I 'll update if I reach to a safe conclusion.

    UPDATE: I removed apport-gtk because I noticed an extreme CPU-usage during login and my system now behaves normally.

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