Speed up your Ubuntu machine boot time
Are you desperately searching for ways to finally reach that elusive 10 second boot time? You certainly heard that Ubuntu 10.04 has the capability of doing just that right? It can...but you have to help it along. One of the ways you can help your boot time is removing unnecessary services and drivers that are loaded at boot time. Fortunately, this isn't something you have to manually do. How is this? There is a tool that can help the Grub boot loader learn what it is you need at start up. This tool is called profile.
Profile is not a tool you install, or run from the command line. Instead, profile is an option you add to your grub configuration file to inform the boot loader you want to create a profile  during the next boot loading sequence. In this article I am going to show you how to profile your grub boot sequence for a faster boot process.
How this works
When you boot up your machine Grub does a search for all the necessary drivers to load. This takes time. Instead of making Grub search for these drivers, the profiling actually makes Grub remember every driver necessary to work, thereby cutting down all of the driver load times.
This is a proven technique that can help the boot process. It has actually been around since Ubuntu 6.04, so it has been tested and tested and does work. I will make this normal disclaimer. Even though Grub profile works, anytime you deal with your bootloader you take the chance that you can render your machine unbootable. So you use this tool at your own risk. Don't take that to mean profile is a dangerous tool and your machine will wind up bricked and mocking you...that is just to say should something happen, you were warned.
How to add profiling
To do this you are going to have to modify your /etc/default/grub file. The edits are not challenging at all. So, open up a terminal window and get ready to work.
The line you are looking for is:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
This is the line that gives the options to Grup upon boot. You need to add one more option to that line so it now looks like:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash profile"
Save that file and then issue the command:
sudo update-grub2
You are ready to reboot your machine.
During this next boot time you will see a noticeable SLOW DOWN. This is normal because Grub is now running the profile. This is quite necessary.
Once the boot up is complete, open up that /etc/default/grub file, remove the profile entry you just added, and re-run the command sudo update-grub2. Now reboot your machine again and see if you don't notice a distinct speed increase in your boot times.
Final thoughts
There are so many ways to speed up the boot process of your Ubuntu Linux machine. This process, however, is one of the ones that will truly speed up the process and is tested and safe to use. You should gain some noticeable increases and should even speed up after 2 or 3 more start ups.
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Does this still apply to current Ubuntu versions? eg. 14.04.1?
Amazing,
Toshiba Satellite a10
Original : 58 secodns
Profile on : 84 seconds
post: 28 seconds
How to do this when I only have update-grub and no update-grub2? :<
/etc/default/grub: line 1: splashâ€: nie znaleziono polecenia
Thank you for this precious information…………
Original : 22.7 seconds
Profile on: 22.9 seconds
Post Profile: 21.8 seconds
Dell Latitude 6510
Booting to login screen:
Original: 45.832
Profile On: 40.057
Post Profiling I: 39.516
Post Profiling II: 39.662
I suppose every little bit is nice.
I don’t really see this boot profiling is needed since we have ureadahead.
would also be nice to know how to undo again, in case it fails or some things don’t work anymore. How to remove the saved profile, that is.
Is it just a file?
and also why you need to remove it after booting ??
why cant you just do it in the grub loader on boot up. Press “E” when your grub boots up to edit and add profile on the kernel you usually use . ??
Boot speed not improved. Same speed.
I have i3 4GB Dell New Inspiron R.
Funny thing is…
I have the same laptop. Not the best, huh…
It does speed things up, BUT, I cant start firefox anymore on neither of the two machines ive used this on. And it is exactly since trying it.
How is this possible?
Thanks Jack!
Speed thrills.
Why not just add the profile argument once at boot time from within grub?