Benchmark Results: Boot, Hibernate, Wake, And Shut Down Times
Most operating systems tout their boot times measured from when the boot loader finishes to the time the desktop appears. Not waiting for the desktop to become usable is obviously bogus. And as far as we're concerned, the OS/distribution gets to choose its boot loader and configure it, so the time it takes to function should be counted as well.
All of these times were measured using a stopwatch. For boot and wake times, we began timing when the power button on the PC was pressed and finished the count when a usable desktop appeared.
Our 64-bit test system takes about fourteen seconds to POST before GRUB takes over. This brief window was removed from the boot and wake times, since the OS has nothing to do with it. For hibernate and shut down times, we measured from the time shut down or hibernate was confirmed in the OS to the time that the PC powered down.
Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope made significant improvements to boot times, and 9.10 Karmic Koala continued shaving the seconds off with the introduction of Upstart, which erased the “unusable desktop.”
Lucid is faster yet, and just look how it improves over Hardy Heron, the OS it is replacing as the most current LTS. The new 10.04 LTS is almost 30 seconds faster than 8.04. The boot time of Lucid Lynx is nearly 20 seconds! The 10 second boot time that Canonical had hoped to achieve with this release seems entirely possible, if only on an SSD.
Hardy goes into hibernation a good four seconds faster than Lucid. But the Lynx outperforms the Heron by roughly eight seconds when coming out of hibernation and when shutting down. For some reason, Hardy wakes much faster than it boots, while Lucid is quicker to boot than to awaken. We're calling Lucid the overall winner here considering that it outperformed Hardy in three out of four tests - major improvement in boot times.
