Startup Scenes

Charly's Column – systemd-analyze

Article from Issue 212/2018
Author(s):

In sys admin columnist Charly's case, no fumbled system startup goes undetected. This was already the case with SysVinit and has not changed with systemd. In terms of the his analysis tools, no stopwatch goes unturned.

If a distribution shows its splash screen on startup – and almost all of them do – then I turn it off as of the second boot. I want to see the kernel messages rushing by when booting. Because more often than you might think, there's a problem with booting. When I see something questionable scurry by, I search with a tool like Bootchart [1] to find and fix a hanging process or similar issues quickly.

On systems with systemd, this is also possible in principle, but the tool is different: systemd-analyze. When called without parameters, systemd-analyze calculates the elapsed time until system startup is completed, broken down into kernel and userspace processes:

Startup finished in 3.507s (kernel) + 16.334s (userspace) = 19.842s

[...]

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