With full steam into the new year!

[bzar]

Depends. On my desktop, systemd takes about three times as long to boot as compared to sysvinit. On a friends laptop running ubuntu, systemd is slower than upstart. But supposidely, it's quicker for some. I consider boot times a stupid argument for one or the other, computers today are so fast anyway that nobody cares.

And yet there are users claiming to use "non-bloated" desktop environments because they take less time to start . I agree that too much of the conversation revolves around boot time though. I use it because of the nice tooling. I know everyone doesn't like it, but I find it nicer to have a set of sanely named basic tools with a consistent interface than a hodgepodge of separate ones with imaginative names, configuration conventions, documentation and command line switches. Of course if one is already grown accustomed to some set of tools it's hard to let go, but if you can it may turn out for the better in the long run. Anyway, let's not turn this into yet another a systemd thread. If someone insists on having a say, let's move to one of the pre-existing ones.

Am I the only person who remembers when months long uptime was a badge of honor? How often are you people rebooting that it's a design consideration.

For servers yeah, but for anything else I tend to keep them in the lowest energy consumption state convenient whenever they're not in use. Keeping, say, a desktop computer on at night just for the uptime doesn't come off as practical, at least. I boot once or twice per day, typically, depending on the upgrades available.

 

[levi]

I turn all of my x86 computers off at night, as their fans are too noisy. My Pandora on the other hand only gets explicitly rebooted when there's a new SZ release, and accidentally when I forget to charge it every other day and it runs down overnight (it's got no screen, so I can't check it before bed unless I wire it up to the TV).

 

[TrashyMG]

I turn all of my x86 computers off at night, as their fans are too noisy.

Funny, I have trouble sleeping without the sounds of my computer fans whirring. plus no heat in my room, it helps keep the room sort of warm in the wintertime.

 

[WizardStan]

That's what suspend is for.
I don't normally do this but I did for you. I shut off my computer. I did this to plug in my kill-a-watt. While it was booting it reported about 90 watts. Starting up Chromium it spiked to about 150. Once that was all done and it was idling, it read 70 watts. And then I suspended it. All non-essential systems shut off, just enough power to keep the RAM alive. Kill-a-watt read 2. 2 watts. That's 500 hours to attain 1kwh of energy usage. 8760 hours in a year means that if you never used your computer at all, if it just sat suspended 24 hours a day all year, you would consume about 17.5 kwh. The average household in the USA uses 10800kwh per year, meaning that your PC would be consuming 0.16% of your total power usage: one sixth of one percent of everything you use. While this is not zero, it is practically negligible and you need to do some real cost analysis before making decisions based on boot times.
Assuming an average cost of 12 cents per kwh (according to google), that's $2.10 every year. More realistically, let's assume half that: you boot up your computer at 8am and shut it down at 8pm, thus it's only "wasting" $1.05 every year. Is the time it takes to shut down and boot back up again every day all year worth $1.05?

 

[slaeshjag]

Ever since I set up wake on lan on my desktop, I'll just wake it up right before I get up, it's all booted by the time I'm on my chair. I never turn off my laptop, although I probably should, to keep maintenance costs on it down.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

Funny, I have trouble sleeping without the sounds of my computer fans whirring.

A friend of mine used to have a beefy dual-socket 1HE server he got for cheap because some intern dropped it and damaged the front cover, which canceled its support contract or something like that. He didn't mind sleeping in the same room at all, but he wasn't able to hear his alarm clock anymore. Placing it on the floor was a great replacement for the vacuum cleaner, though.

 

[bzar]

That's what suspend is for.
I don't normally do this but I did for you. I shut off my computer. I did this to plug in my kill-a-watt. While it was booting it reported about 90 watts. Starting up Chromium it spiked to about 150. Once that was all done and it was idling, it read 70 watts. And then I suspended it. All non-essential systems shut off, just enough power to keep the RAM alive. Kill-a-watt read 2. 2 watts. That's 500 hours to attain 1kwh of energy usage. 8760 hours in a year means that if you never used your computer at all, if it just sat suspended 24 hours a day all year, you would consume about 17.5 kwh. The average household in the USA uses 10800kwh per year, meaning that your PC would be consuming 0.16% of your total power usage: one sixth of one percent of everything you use. While this is not zero, it is practically negligible and you need to do some real cost analysis before making decisions based on boot times.
Assuming an average cost of 12 cents per kwh (according to google), that's $2.10 every year. More realistically, let's assume half that: you boot up your computer at 8am and shut it down at 8pm, thus it's only "wasting" $1.05 every year. Is the time it takes to shut down and boot back up again every day all year worth $1.05?

For the cost-benefit ratio you are correct, and I applaud your conviction to go as far as backing it up with actual evidence. I don't use suspend much because I've had severe issues with it in the past. Hence the 'lowest energy consumption state convenient'.

 

[FlapJack]

Why can't we just say that we're WRONG in our assessment(s)? WHY cant we just say THE WORDS? WHY?

@WizardStan made quite a few factual points, paragraphs full. They were neither great or inferior, they were just factual. I enjoyed reading and absorbing and cross-checking such facts. He's a good egg that WizardStan guy.
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Ever since I set up wake on lan on my desktop, I'll just wake it up right before I get up, it's all booted by the time I'm on my chair. I never turn off my laptop, although I probably should, to keep maintenance costs on it down.

If it's a LAPTOP, then it does have a finite lifetime. I didn't think that mine had, but it failed after about 3 to 4 years. The components within are being heated on a regular basis. The air-flow isn't like a tower case. It's all confined and constantly being thermally affected. I took my laptop apart and saw that the GPU (that was soldered onto the motherboard) was defective. It would cost me more to order the replacement board than to just buy a new LAPTOP.

 

[bzar]

Why can't we just say that we're WRONG in our assessment(s)? WHY cant we just say THE WORDS? WHY?

@WizardStan made quite a few factual points, paragraphs full. They were neither great or inferior, they were just factual. I enjoyed reading and absorbing and cross-checking such facts. He's a good egg that WizardStan guy.
[doublepost=1486808306,1486804278][/doublepost]

I assume you meant me. Which assessment did I make that I was wrong in? The practicality of keeping hardware on just for the uptime? I do stand by that. WizardStan was probably entirely correct about the cost of a computer in standby, but I never made any assessments about that. I did give a reason why suspend isn't (or at least hasn't been) a practical alternative for me, even if it does make the cost neglible, but that's just my case, not a general claim.

What do you want me to say I was wrong about?

 

[WizardStan]

What do you want me to say I was wrong about?

I'm good. You made an excellent explanation about why it doesn't work for you. As long as it works on the Pyra, as it does on the Pandora it shouldn't be a concern though.
Although, there is an argument even on the Pandora (and subsequently the Pyra) for a complete shutdown.
The Pandora has a 4200mah battery. This is enough to give it about 10 hours of standard use: playing most games, editing documents, etc... Turn on the wifi, play a more CPU intensive and memory exhaustive game, crank up the brightness to full and that cuts down to about 4-6 hours, but go the other way, keep it idling with all peripherals (wifi, screen, USB) turned off (usually just close the screen) and it will last for days, almost a week from a full charge if I recall correctly. If you suspend the Pandora I think it was estimated that the battery will run out after just over 2 weeks. That's a lot of time to go without a charge. But then, if you actually shut it down, the battery only keeps powering long lived things like the clock, and from this it can survive for months on a full charge before it falls below 3v. If keeping the clock ticking while the system is off isn't a concern for you, if you're ok with turning it on to January 1st 1970, then you can pull the battery and it'll last for years (at which point it'll likely be completely dead or close to it from lack of exercise, but that's besides the point)
If you're going to be without power for an extended period of time, days or possibly weeks, and you need to maintain a charge so you can use it sporadically, then you have a very good reason to want to shut down between uses, and probably pull the battery too. Is this a situation that warrants consideration when deciding if a particular init system should be chosen because it boots faster?
Now I'm envisioning some kind of secret agent who gets caught because his flashy Pyra hacking computer didn't boot up fast enough

 

[kabaiakh]

Now I'm envisioning some kind of secret agent who gets caught because his flashy Pyra hacking computer didn't boot up fast enough