UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hey all,

What we have at work is a Themis board (VME rack SPARC system).

We have to try to have the boot time as fast as can be. What we have already done is make some filesystems read only so if power is lost then the filesystem check will not run. This is only done to the partitions that we will not be writting to at all.

That is all we have done so far. Though what I have thought of is to look more into the RC.x directories and shutdown any services that are started they may not need to be. The system will never connect to the internet and runs through a dumb terminal as graphics are displayed on a monitors in a different section.

Apart from doing that does any one know of any other thing that could be done to allow the system to boot faster?

Also does any one know where I can get some good in depth info on the RC.x files/directories (I'm trying to be a bit lazy here, huge for me )

Thanks in advance for any one who can provide me with some information.


Cheers
Woofie




P.S: We do have a boot time from cold or warm boot of around 3 minutes and this also includes the loading of the software we will be adding to the machine. Every second for this project counts I don't care if you only know how to knock off 2 seconds, as I said it all counts.

Provide a little more information. Execute the following and post it:

1. ls /etc/rc*.d
2. cat /etc/inittab

Cheers,

Keith

I've never heard of Themis before so I don't know if some of these will help.

Insure your diag-switch?=false and diag-level=min (min or off) in eeprom/OBP - having the switch set to true will increase your boot time.

If you are running NIS, make this system a slave so it binds to itself instead of trying to find a slave /master on the network.

If you are running DNS, set this server up as either a cache-only or slave - this will save time if starting other services.

Try to get rid of anything you don't use - may be a trial and error period - look at the startup scripts - each one may be looking for something to be there before running - if it isn't there (like a config file) then it probably isn't being used and you can move it from a Sxxscript to sxxscript - don't just delete it as you may find you DID need it. Moving it to a lowercase s will cause it not to start. Another thing to look at is shutdown - the K scripts will slow down your reboot if they are doing the same type of thing as startup - looking for a config file that did not exist - this may not save you 2 seconds but half a second - find the one's you don't need and you improve total reboot time.