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?
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.
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.
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.
Only if its abysmal.
I don’t remember the last time I rebooted by laptop. Of course it doesn’t run Windows either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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-rebootingsays so.
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.
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.
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.
