The applications used were the versions supplied by default with the distro.
Boot times listed below do not include the 7 to 13 seconds needed to reach the Grub prompt from poweron.
But before I give the measurements, a few caveats about sources of measurement error.
Power level. You need to understand linux's power management to get this right. I don't yet. A Nov 2005 blog entry discusses Ubuntu power management a bit..
My compaq 3000 seems to pick 'high performance' if brightness is all the way up. This reduces boot time from 47 seconds to 41 seconds. The compaq 700 is stuck on low power on ubuntu unless you give the command 'cpufreq-selector -g performance'. All measurements below are on high power as far as possible except for the 500MHz results for the compaq 700.
System menu configuration. In the compaq 3000 tests, ubuntu was configured to show Wanda the Fish and start one xterm. This adds seconds to the login time, and may have affected other times. I should redo my measurements sometime with this ironed out.
Deciding when login is finished. e.g. I used 'when Firefox icon appears in menu bar' for Ubuntu, but 'when date and time appear in menu bar' is also valid, and adds two seconds to login time.
Number of documents on desktop. Whether a CD-ROM is in the drive. I think I didn't have a CD-ROM inserted for any of these tests, but I'm not sure.
Warm vs. cold boot. Reaching the Grub prompt was six seconds faster on a warm boot, but that shouldn't affect further measurements, should it?
Application startup order. I tried to always run each app just once per boot, and in the same order (OOo first, then firefox, then abiword), but might not always have followed that order.
xterm vs. menus. I sometimes started the apps from xterm, sometimes from the system menu.
default start page. On my 3000, firefox's start page was google.com; on the 700, it was a local disk file.
As a result of the above uncertainties, the measurements below are probably accurate to 10% or +- three seconds, whichever is worse, so take them with a grain of salt.
| OS | RAM1 | boot | login | writer | Firefox | RAM2 | boot | login | writer | Firefox | Gnome | Writer | Firefox |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fc3 | 416 | 65 | 26 | 20 | 6.6 | 96 | 121 | 52 | 58 | 9.2 | 2.8.0 | 1.1.2 | 0.10.1 |
| fc4 | 416 | 56 | 19 | 23 | 11 | 96 | 112 | 39 | 75 | 18 | 2.10.1 | 1.9.104 | 1.0.4 |
| ub5.11 | 416 | 60 | 19 | 11 | 5.5 | 96 | 57 | 49 | 53 | 13 | 2.12.1 | 1.9.129 | 1.0.7 |
| ub6.06 | 416 | 41 | 17 | 11 | 7 | 96 | 47 | 50 | 67 | 2.14.3 | 2.0.2 | 1.5.0.5 | |
| fc5t2 | 416 | 57 | 11 | 10 | 4.8 | 96 | 110 | 32 | 60 | 19 | 2.13.4 | 2.0.1 | 1.5 |
| RAM | boot | login | abi | ooo | firefox |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 64MB | 62 | 147 | 18 | 360? | - |
| 96MB | 47 | 50 | 9 | 67 | - |
| 128MB | 49 | 27 | 6 | 52 | 13 |
| 192MB | 42 | 20 | 5 | 28 | 12 |
| 416MB | 41 | 17 | 3 | 11 | 7 |
9 seconds to reach grub prompt not included below,
Windows XP: freshly installed, with ooo quick launch disabled, but with Google Pack, Real Networks, and Adobe updaters loaded by default:
cpu 500MHz boot 33 login 7(22 to wait cursor goes away) ooo 30 firefox 17 cpu 1000MHz boot 33 login 6(21 to wait cursor goes away) ooo 38 firefox 16No, I don't know why open office startup time was slower on the high-speed run. I need to rerun a few times to figure that out.
Ubuntu 6.06: with absolutely no customizations (except for cpufreq as described below): (e.g. no wanda the fish, no xterm loaded at startup).
cpu 500MHz boot 53 login 15 ooo 32-46 firefox 13 abiword 5 cpu 1000MHz boot 53 login 14 ooo 25 firefox 9 abiword 5Note: the cpu speed in the 1000MHz case was switched to 1000MHz in /etc/rc.local with the command 'cpufreq-selector -g performance', so it might not have happened early enough to influence the boot time.
Note the large impact of CPU speed on OpenOffice startup time on Linux.