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Speeding Up Debian Boot Process

My MTA (exim4) was taking about 10-20 seconds to start, holding back the boot process so I’ve tried this simple hack: Make Debian boot faster

Edit the startup script /etc/init.d/rc.
Changing the line:

startup $i start

to the following:

startup $i start &

Launching the startup scripts in parallel rather than waiting for each to complete first before running the next could cause problems with dependencies but on a vanilla 3.1 install it hasn’t caused any trouble (so far) and the system boots noticeably faster.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 12:13 am and is filed under Linux, howto. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Speeding Up Debian Boot Process”

  1. Tim Hardy Says:
    September 24th, 2005 at 4:23 pm

    I’ve disabled this after fixing exim’s slow startup: details here. Now that exim starts rapidly, the speed gain is negligible and doesn’t outweigh the chance that this could possibly cause problems in the future as my system evolves. YMMV.

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