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Tiger Startup Times

There was a Slashdot article recently about launchd, the new ultra-daemon that replaces init, cron, xinetd, and a whole host of random startup scripts. In the comments, an over-zealous Apple employee claimed that Tiger boots in 4 seconds. Well, erm, not really. It turns out he considers “booting” to be the thing that happens between the time the gray apple logo disappears and the login prompt appears. Of course, in the real world, the rest of us consider “boot time” to be the time that elapses between you pushing the power button and the login prompt appearing. This, naturally, is nowhere near 4 seconds.

Just out of curiosity I decided to time the different (user-visible) stages of booting. Here's what I got:

  1. Pushing power button to gray apple logo appearing: 20 seconds
  2. Gray apple appearing to blue screen appearing: 23 seconds
  3. Blue screen appearing to login prompt: 5 seconds

So 4 seconds is fairly accurate for the last stage, but the user-perceived boot time is more like a minute. To be fair, though, there were another few seconds of beachball action before I could actually type my username and log in.

Incidentally, that crazy 20-second wait before anything at all appears on the screen was really nerve-wracking the first time I turned on my PowerBook. I thought the thing was broken.

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May 3rd, 2005 [Apple • OS X] 2 comments permalink TB
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  Comments:

1. bob replies:

Black screen to grey apple shouldn’t take 20s. It takes like 2s max on any of my macs.
However, grey apple to “gui boot” takes AGES on any mac, like, 20-25s.
then the rest is just like you.
so total is more like 30-40s boot time on a regular machine ( i assume if you have 8GB of ram maybe it takes 10s+ to get from black to apple;)

May 6th, 2005 at 1:37 am

2. n8gray replies:

Are you talking about a cold boot or a reboot?  Reboots don’t spend a long time at the black screen but cold boots have always spent a long time there on my machine.  If 2s is normal for black screen to gray screen then maybe there really is something wrong with my machine!  :-/

May 6th, 2005 at 1:29 pm

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Play HexaLex for iPhone

Like my work? Check out HexaLex, my game for iPhone & iPod Touch. It's a crossword game like Scrabble, but played with hexagonal tiles. http://www.hexalex.com