“Renew the desktop using the advice of Linus Torvalds—boot from a Solid-state Disk.”
My desktop seemed slow. It is four years old and has faced a fair amount of criticism from my family. I toyed with the idea of buying a new one. Moore's Law is supposed to still hold good, but I found that the extra performance is via more cores. bach core is not much faster. Hence, the new desktop may not be any faster, at least, for booting and signing in. And what would I do with the older one? I had installed Fedora when I bought the system. Since then, I have been upgrading it. 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 to 27 seconds!
However, the comparison wasn't fair. The original installation had a lot of services installed on it. oemoving the additional services reduced the boot time to 45 seconds. The kernel and the initramfs timings were about the same. So what was the difference? There may be some issues related to repeated upgrades of the distribution, which are not the supported methods. While searching IRU GLIIHUHnFHs, , GLG finG Dn HxSlDnDWLRn IRU why WhH EWhHUnHW interface was still named eth0 and not em0 as per the default Fedora installation. During the upgrades, an additional package called biosdevname was introduced, yet it was ignored. No package required it; so, its use was optional. Besides, the 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 seconds. responsiveness of the system. Systemd-analyze showed the new ERRW WLmH Ds 14 sHFRnGs. 7hLs figuUH Ls HvHn mRUH UHmDUNDElH when you 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 to 27 seconds after defragmentation, and to 7 seconds with SSD!