Measuring Ubuntu’s Boot Performance

Last year leading up to the release of Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” and Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” we had published several articles looking at various aspects of this desktop Linux distribution. These articles had varied from looking at Ubuntu’s power consumption for the past six major releases to presenting the visual history of Ubuntu and how its graphics have evolved since Ubuntu 4.10. With Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” shipping in just two months, we are once again looking at Ubuntu from several points of view. In this article, we are looking at Ubuntu’s boot performance for the past five releases through the use of Bootchart for measuring its boot time, disk throughput, and the running processes.