I very freely admit that I have significant gaps in my knowledge of all things computer-related. For example, I have only rudimentary understanding of TCP/IP.
But one thing has been bothering me lately, and while I realize that this question is probably the computational equivalent of "why is the sky blue?" in meteorology, I'll ask it: Why does it take so long for an OS to boot, and also a long time for it to shut down? Or, if the general case is too hard to answer, then I'll ask specifically: Can anyone explain to me why it takes so long for MSWindows to boot? I mean, I realize that there's lots of device drivers to load, but should it really that that much longer for MSWindows to load than it takes for any other large program, like MSWord?
And especially for shutdown: if I have no applications open, why does it take more then 2 or 3 seconds to shut the machine down?
Do you remember Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the bad guys finally find the Ark of the Covenent and open it, releasing all sorts of strange spirits? It takes a while. Of course, shutting down means stuffing them all back in the box.
I would have used the "genie back in the bottle" image, but then I wouldn't be able to make a Stonecutter's Guild reference.
For the record (lino-nuts of the world), my Linux partition has about the same boot time as my Windows 98 partition. There are some free startup managers for Windows that can help you remove some junk (that doesn't appear in the startup folder) to help your boot time as well.
The quickest OS for boot time that I've seen is BeOS, at @15 seconds from boot sector to music. Shutdown is generally about 2 seconds, or you can just hit the power button (journaled OS ya know).
Re:Services
ziggy on 2002-05-01T13:33:14
Yep. When I was running BeOS on my desktop, the longest part of the boot sequence was waiting for the hardware initialization (POST, BIOS displays, finding the graphics card and turning it on, etc.). From hitting the boot sector to a usable desktop took 10-12 seconds on my dual-Celeron 400 config. That whole damn system is so responsive, it's sheer existance contradicts Joel Spolsky's assertion that "software should never be rewritten".The quickest OS for boot time that I've seen is BeOS, at @15 seconds from boot sector to music. Shutdown is generally about 2 seconds, or you can just hit the power button (journaled OS ya know).:-) My guess is that the Befolk were very good at cuttting corners or deferring perceived boot time. No one (save Palm, and other embedded system designers) seems to be too concerned about this.
Why does Winders take so long? If you look at billg's testimony, Windows isn't as much about providing a clean platform that developers can build upon as much as it's about providing a large set of backward-compatibility APIs developers are familiar with. Presumably similar arguments can be made for MacOS[X].
Hardware and drivers are an issue in boot time. I swapped out my CD-R last year, and now FreeBSD takes an extra 10-20 seconds to boot when it's starting the IDE controller. There's probably a wonky timeout issue somewhere, probably because something isn't terminated properly.
