LiveCDPerformance

Revision 7 as of 2005-04-25 05:51:54

Clear message

Live CD Performance

Status

Introduction

The boot time for the Ubuntu live CD should be comparable (or superior) to other popular live CDs.

Rationale

Scope and Use Cases

Implementation Plan

Performance issues in two areas:

1) Installer

  • Can generation of locales be made faster?

The LiveCDPrompts looking after eliminate some unnecesary questions in the boot process. Language, keyboard layout and so on are some of them.

If we already now this stuff we save time from the input data and the reconfiguring of packages.

A possible solution is placing a localised version on the mirrors. For example, Spanish mirror with Spanish localised Live CD, and so on.

  • Background things like network setup?

We don't actually need setup the network at the begining

2) Post-di boot

  • Readahead configuration may be suboptimal
  • Do we need gdm?

GDM takes a lot of memory (what we need during the live session to run the applications) and takes a lot of time to run. We could run the /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager instead of the GDM

  • The dma activations help, but no so much
  • We need check out the filemsystem compresion(whichever we want to use: cloop, squashfs...) perfomance. But seems this is not the main problem.
  • Check out if we run unnecessaries services at the distribution boot time

NEEDS INSTRUMENTATION - do we have detailed enough logfiles?

Data Preservation and Migration

Packages Affected

User Interface Requirements

Outstanding Issues

UDU BOF Agenda

  • d-i performance
  • casper performance

  • Ubuntu boot performance (FasterBoot)

UDU Pre-Work

  • Profile the live CD boot sequence to measure the time taken for each step
    • d-i startup (time-to-first-question)
    • Pre-casper d-i activity (measured per menu entry)
    • Casper d-i activity (measured per casper.d script)
    • Standard boot sequence