Why does Ubuntu 11.10 start and shut down so slowly?

Question

Ubuntu's always been very fast on my computer. I have 3GB RAM, and previous versions booted in under 40s and shut down in under 5s. Most recently, Natty took 40s to boot and only 4s to shut down. However, since installing Oneiric, my boot time has gone up to 50s and my shut down time to over 11s! A slight increase is fine, but this is quite alarming. I wait for applications to properly terminate, so that's not the issue. The only startup applications I have are Jupiter and Caffeine.

Solution

The problem is the links /etc/rc0.d/S35networking and /etc/rc6.d/S35networking.

I've reported a bug in Launchpad.

Comments

[Knowledge Cube]

@NyamiouTheGaleanthrope Unity is still part of the overall Ubuntu experience, even if some other things might have been neglected a little during development, which is debatable. With the transition to GNOME 3, I would imagine the whole desktop needed reworking to account for this. And in only 6 months, no less.

[Satchit Bhogle]

I just need to add that once Ubuntu has booted, everything is a lot faster; Nautilus, USC, the works, which just confuses me further.

[developer]

I just hope that on the Ubuntu 12.04 cycle the developers will be focused on others thinks than Unity because since Unity appear the Ubuntu developers (I mean the one that work for Canonical) seams to be working mostly if not only on Unity and Unity related features. Because what we have now is a system that take longer to boot and where the overall performance is lesser than what it was a year ago (check Phoronix benchmarks, you'll see). The GNOME 3 apps are faster than on GNOME 2 but that's not the work of Ubuntu developpers.

[fDruga]

Fast again at what? Boot or shutdown? And how fast is that?

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

You're not far, since this script is currently indirectly a stop-condition for network-manager. However, please don't modify or change the order of those, since it can have much more important effects than just speeding up startup/shutdown time. In other words, there is indeed a bug (thanks for reporting it) but that's not the right way to fix it. :)