topic Re: Decrease reboot time in HPE 9000 and HPE e3000 Servers

Decrease reboot time

Joe Profaizer — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:35:21 GMT

Is there a command in ISL that will set my system permanantly to boot faster so that I don't have to watch all that Process, IO, and Memory displays?

If not, how do I speed up my reboots and startups?

..Joe

Re: Decrease reboot time

A. Clay Stephenson — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:41:21 GMT

You can speed it up a little bit by setting 'FASTBOOT' to 'ON' in the firmware monitor but normally rebooting is such an infrequent thing that it is not a problem. The better answer is to attack why you are rebooting so much. Fastboot bypasses the memory check.

Re: Decrease reboot time

Helen French — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:42:22 GMT

Hi,

You can set the "FASTBOOT" option to "ON" on the Boot console menu. But it is not advisable to do so, as you will not able to see any boot warnings and error messages.

See this thread for some information:

http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=28e4c7151c8101d61d/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000047257291

HTH,
Shiju

Re: Decrease reboot time

S.K. Chan — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:42:33 GMT

You can set FASTBOOT to "on" but do you really want to bypass the hardware check ?

Re: Decrease reboot time

Patrick Wallek — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:43:47 GMT

The only way I know of to somewhat speed up the boot process is turn FASTBOOT on. What this does, as far as I know, is disables the memory checks when the machine is coming up. The problem with it is that is disables memory checks when the machine is coming up. If something happens and you have a bad SIMM, it won't alert you if FASTBOOT is on.

Other than that, there is not much that can be done to speed up the boot process. Yes, it can be damned slow at times, when you want it to hurry up, but that's just the way it is.

Re: Decrease reboot time

harry d brown jr — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:49:12 GMT

Joe, don't get offended: Don't reboot = fast reboot :-)

live free or die
harry

Re: Decrease reboot time

David Lieberman_1 — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:49:36 GMT

Joe,
Here's a link (and HP's position on the issue - mine as well...):
http://us-support3.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=8e6d2ddd1d002ad2e9/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000047257291

I recommend leaving FASTBOOT=OFF unless you are installing patches, or need to reboot multiple times in a row for maintenance. The few minutes (maybe) saved are not (imo) worth the grief if flaky memory or hardware is undetected and crashes the box.

Re: Decrease reboot time

Ron Kinner — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:58:22 GMT

You might take a look at your processes and see if you are loading something you don't need.

I expect if you were really brave you could go into your S and K files and pull out stuff that doesn't need to be there. No point in killing SNMP if you never start it in the first place.

Just my two cents.

Ron

Re: Decrease reboot time

David Lieberman_1 — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 20:00:07 GMT

Ha! I started typing when there was only one response... lol

Re: Decrease reboot time

Sanjay_6 — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 20:00:57 GMT

Hi Joe,

You can do that by enabling "FASTBOOT" on the system. You can do with going to PDC and then disabling FASTBOOT. Do remember that if you do this, it will disable the memory test.

Hope this helps.

Regds

Re: Decrease reboot time

John Bolene — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 14:22:41 GMT

On the newer servers and especially 800 class machines, they all have to go thru hardware checks which take 5 - 15 minutes.

If a 700 class machine turn off the memory checking as has been reported before.

Also you may not need to start up all the things that are started in the bootup such as the audio server, NIS, NFS, etc. Check in the /etc/rc.config.d/stuff to see if you can disable any stuff.

Re: Decrease reboot time

Paul R. Dittrich — Mon, 25 Feb 2002 12:45:26 GMT

Just my $.02 here....

If you DO decide to cut down the number of processes that get started at boot time, I prefer to do it by changing the upper-case "S" to a lower-case "s" on the startup links.
(I leave the K scripts untouched.)

This prevents them from starting but it is very easy to reverse if necessary and also provides its own record of the changes.

Paul

Re: Decrease reboot time

Bill Hassell — Mon, 25 Feb 2002 14:22:48 GMT

If you are running 11.11 (aka, 11i), setboot now has a number of new options to speed up the reboot process. You can view the new man page at docs.hp.com by looking for the keyword: speedyboot.

FASTBOOT refers only to the extended memory test and does not affect basic RAM tests or any hardware tests. It is recommended to leave FASTBOOT=off for production machines. However, with new machines that support speedyboot, even if you disable some hardware tests and set FASTBOOT=on, the processor firware will reset these back to normal if a hardware error (an HPMC crash) is detected.

When you are changing a server's kernel or doing a lot of patching or upgrading, you can speed up the process significantly by simply removing extra RAM. Leave about 256 to 512 megs of RAM as that is all you'll need to run SAM and swinstall. The effect of physically removing RAM is much more dramatic than FASTBOOT as standard memory tests are always run, so less RAM = faster reboots.