Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade and boot times

Another effect of upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 was a decrease in the computer boot times, as reported by bootchart. Before, under Ubuntu 8.10, my computer, tbroma (short for theobroma, the food of the gods, chocolate!) booted in 34 seconds. (This doesn't count the time while the BIOS is discovering devices and then starting a bootloader, in this case GRUB, from the hard drive.) After upgrading to 9.04, the bootchart time was 31 seconds. This is not a huge difference, but it is a sign of things to come, as the boot time effort continues in the upcoming 9.10.

An aside: presumably one of the benefits of building the most frequently used modules into the kernel is reduced boot time from reduced module loading. (The built-in nature of the CPU frequency/voltage modules eliminated, for now, my software undervolting, as described in an earlier post).

Looking at the bootchart output, I decided that freshclam and privoxy were expendable; that is, they didn't need to be started automatically at boot time. Freshclam is the automatic updater for the clamav antivirus package, but because I wasn't running a server of any sort, the occasional manual update would be OK. Privoxy is a "privacy proxy" which stands between your web browser and the raw Internet; it can filter advertisements and disallow many flavors of activity, based on your degree of concern or paranoia, such as disallowing Javascript. I had used privoxy for a couple of years, primarily to block all those *!#@^ animated advertisements on web pages, but I did need to turn it off now and then because it interfered with a few web sites: toggle privoxy off, and the web site would work fine. I tried modifying several privoxy settings -- there are a lot of them -- but some web pages I could not get to work with privoxy, at least not without changing the privoxy settings one-at-a-time. I wasn't interested in that much work! Now I am using the AdBlock Plus Firefox extension to block the ads (works very well), the problematic web sites work, and without clamav and privoxy the bootchart time lost another second, to 30 seconds.

Lately -- I am embarassed to admit this -- I eliminated a duplicate attempt to start Firestarter, a free Open Source firewall. I'd been seeing the error messages from the second attempt for a long time, but was too lazy to track them down, as the firewall was working fine when I logged in. At any rate, now the bootchart time is down to 29 seconds, 5 seconds faster than before the upgrade.

If you are interested, here is my current bootchart output. Click on it to get the larger, (more) readable image.