Startup Scenes
Charly's Column – systemd-analyze

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
Of course, I want to know more about those processes now. The command systemd-analyze blame
gives me a list of all processes started at boot time. They are sorted by the elapsed time before the process has fully launched. I usually only see the 10 biggest time hogs, as shown in Listing 1.
Listing 1
systemd-analyze blame | head
1min 3.753s apt-daily.service 40.702s apt-daily-upgrade.service 8.649s fail2ban.service 4.246s networking.service 3.327s smokeping.service 2.622s apache2.service 2.303s mysql.service 2.206s postfix.service 1.835s dev-sdb1.device 993ms munin-node.service
In this particular case, I can ignore the candidates in lines 1 and 2 – they appear if the system performs unattended updates or upgrades on startup. Fortunately, they do not block any other processes and simply wriggle around a bit in the background. systemd-analyze
does not calculate them for this reason, as can already be seen from the sums.
Serial Plot
With the plot
parameter, I can create a kind of timeline in SVG format, which shows the boot process in a very clear graphical way. For this to work, the graphwiz package must be installed. The command is then:
systemd-analyze plot > systemd-boot.svg
Figure 1 shows a small section of the results. The start time of the individual processes is symbolized here by a red bar. Not only the start order and times, but all the dependencies between the services, can be summarized by the tool in the form of an SVG graphic:
systemd-analyze dot | dot -Tsvg > dependencies.svg

Caution: The result is really huge and probably only makes life easier for owners of A1-sized plotters.
Infos
- Bootchart: http://www.bootchart.org
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