Is there anything I can do to improve boot speed?

Question

I love my Pi, but it takes a considerable time to boot. If I want to use it as a Media Centre, it's quite important that it powers up quickly.

Are there any steps I can take to improve boot performance?

That was my initial response, but [other](http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/325/is-it-suitable-for-running-continuously-24-7) [questions](http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/251/how-can-i-determine-when-an-sd-card-needs-replacement) have made me think twice about doing this. — Jivings, Jun 15 '12 at 07:46
SD cards life is largely dependant on writes. Are they affected by leaving them on? — Alex Chamberlain, Jun 15 '12 at 07:48
I have no idea how many disk writes an install performs while idle... — Jivings, Jun 15 '12 at 08:47
@Haskeller Since that would have to be via USB I doubt it would improve performance. — Jivings, Jul 18 '12 at 07:53
My Class 10 SD card has ~7MB/s while my external HDD has ~30MB/s — ArchHaskeller, Jul 22 '12 at 20:50
@Haskeller Yes, sorry. I was thinking about USB 1.1 for some reason, which wouldn't have been much faster at all. — Jivings, Jul 22 '12 at 20:55

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 18 '17 at 05:51

Certain things can be disabled that improve boot up speed - swap for instance (my Pi takes ages to activate it.)

However, SD card reads are comparatively slow, and the device itself isn't all that fast - I don't think there's a magic bullet to make it boot up that much faster than by default.

I know it's something you've considered already, but personally I would just leave it on. The two main reasons for not doing so appear to be stability (which could be solved by a cron job reboot every so often if it proves to be an issue at all) and SD card wear. While I don't have any figures on how quickly the latter will take place, there's things you can do to mitigate it (disabling swap) and for the price of SD cards, I'd be tempted to just see what happens. If it dies relatively quickly, you can revisit it and you've not thrown away that much. If it lasts for a couple of years or more (which I highly suspect may well be the case, though I have no benchmarks for that) I think £10 every few years is a rather low maintenance cost in the grand scheme of things.

As mentioned already the main thing that kills SD cards is lots of writes, and I can't think of anything that would really be doing that (or should be doing that) when the Pi is sitting idle.

I don't think stability is a problem - Linux machines are known to run for many months, often years, without rebooting. As for writes, there are a lot of log files in `/var/log` that will be regularly updated. The solution would be to disable logging, or mount `/var/log` as tmpfs (which uses system memory as temporary storage.) — Malvineous, Jul 14 '12 at 06:51
What about battery powered applications, where leaving it on is a waste of resources? — tuskiomi, Jun 25 '17 at 02:35

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 14 '12 at 17:31

4

If you are willing to switch to a whole new init system, I've found that using systemd allows the system to boot up considerably quicker, although I haven't done any benchmarks to give any real numbers.

answered Jul 14 '12 at 17:31

ricochet1k

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Arch already uses systemd I believe. – Jivings Jul 14 '12 at 20:14
I had to manually install it and switch to it explicitly. – ricochet1k Jul 15 '12 at 01:00
For what it's worth, I just installed the proposed Arch version, it has systemd enabled by default. (For future reference, today's January 14th 2013). – rahmu Jan 14 '13 at 23:28

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 14 '12 at 01:27

0

Leave it on (as berry120 said:)
Make a bootchart to see what takes time, then eliminate where possible
replace slow software with smaller/faster options
maybe try readahead (or try disabling readahead if it was already on and doing harm)

answered Jul 14 '12 at 01:27

Simon B.

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ArchHaskeller · Answer 4 · 2012-07-23T21:16:11.793

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A few suggestions: Strip SystemV at /etc/rc.sysinit

Remove RAID
Remove LVM(depends)
Remove BTRFS detection

or Use systemd

Parallel load the programs

Compile the kernel with hardfloat

If parts of your root partition are static use Squashfs noted in the wiki

E.g /usr /bin /sbin .. etc..

/etc/fstab

noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,data=writeback

External SSD and HDD for the root partition

edited Jul 23 '12 at 21:16

answered Jul 22 '12 at 20:53

ArchHaskeller

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Could you perhaps explain how to make sections of the filesystem `squashfs`? That would make this answer much more useful, and is also the only thing I'm not already doing. – Jivings Jul 22 '12 at 20:57

Is there anything I can do to improve boot speed?

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