Boot Optimisation Is Entirely Useless When You Reboot Once Or Twice A Year
A few months ago, I spent a weekend optimising the shit out of my system to the point where I could press the power on button and be fully logged into KDE with all my shit open in 8 seconds flat. It seemed like a cool idea at the time as I didn’t have an SSD and that was FuckingFast.png, however I didn’t really think about the fact that I reboot maybe 5 times a year (I totally hotload my kernel: don’t do this) and the fact that fsck likes to run every 90 days.
Enter KDE and nvidia collectively shitting themselves this morning somehow, and Xorg eating my CPU like it was ice cream in a heatwave. I managed to SSH in from another PC to get KDE to cleanly close down (didn’t actually work it seems) and then reboot the PC. At this point I had to leave my house in 5 minutes and needed to check something really important rather quickly. Then I got fscked. Hard. See, it never occurred to me that fsck would need to run on my enormous LVM, nor how long that would take.
I ended up checking what I needed to on my phone and then coming home a few hours later to see fsck at about 80%. Eventually it finished it’s shit and I got logged in to find my KDE session opening shit I closed months ago, and about 6 hours of YATTA work lost (maybe not) as it was open when the system crapped a brick. I still have no idea what happened, nor why YATTA was using 37% of my RAM yet still slow as hell, and where all my swap went, but at least I know that boot optimisation is entirely useless. I am totally getting an SSD in a few weeks to bring this down to sub 5 seconds.
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