Slow Boot New Install of 6.1

[proactivens]

Ok so we now have a product that requires more hardware.

That is the reality and we either have to live with it or go to something else.

I have used the "cursed" dlink linksys etc products before and I still have a few out there, mostly as cold standby for backup purposes.

The cost of my two box scenario has been running about $250 for each box from ebay with new power supplies and CPU fans installed for reliablity.

If I have to start using a $1000 box as the primary it just means that backup will have to be the "CURSED" netgear or linksys etc.

The wiki for required/reccomended hardware needs to be changed to show the new reality of the product. This would avoid having newcomers buy an insufficient machine or waste time trying to determine what is wrong.

TOM

It really depends on the size of your network. Not trying to sell anything here, but there are hardware vendors here, myself included, that sell very affordable, new, and better suited hardware than what your using.

[sky-knight]

Also, bear in mind that those of us that do build and sell Untangle hardware feel your pain. I would LOVE to have a sub $500 box to sell that ran UT well. They just don't exist... and the few that do are such a poor design that I'm unwilling to use them.

Also, bear in mind that I live in a desert, so 1U solutions are out for me, they simply can't cool well enough to be considered.

[dmorris]

a lot of speculation going on here.

fyi, 6.1 tested better on smaller hardware than 6.0

the boot time has nothing to do hardware requirements of a running system.
the boot time went up (if at all) because a change of the garbage collection parameters which affect the startup time of java, this effect will vary significantly depending on the number of cores you have.

[raditude]

It's a dead horse.... The hardware in question was not purchased for this latest version. As PROACTIVENS stated with an upgrade there will be/are changes, the analogy of 98 to xp or OS X 10.4 to 10.5...etc needs to be kept in mind. The boot times I am seeing are in the 7-8min mark with several of the modules installed. Would new hardware fix this, I have no doubt it would, however justifying even as sky-knight stated a min of $500 to a box that does it justice , at this time is difficult.

Because this software is installed on customer owned/pre-owned hardware you are correct it is difficult for UT to really be able to give any solid feedback on what my box or anyone elses will do. For those that sell the hardware you have a much better idea, and this is where I have always deferred in the forums to seeing what you have to say. If I was buying hardware today for 6.1, you are 100% correct I would not buy the hardware it is currently running on, but then again it has been running UT since early 5.x.

Once again my hat goes off to UT, the developers, and everyone in the forums that puts solid information out there. I respect what both PROACTIVENS & sky-knight have to say on the subject, and if I had the funding available would follow their recommendation of grabbing new hardware to resolve this minor issue, because as said before once UT boots, IMO it is as fast or faster than it was running at 6.02, so my only question had to do with the boot process, and it sounds like you either live with it, or because of the requirements of the OS, you upgrade hardware to minimize the boot time. I personally will have to just deal with it, and do what I have implemented, which is to reboot during off-peak times.

[sky-knight]

I personally will have to just deal with it, and do what I have implemented, which is to reboot during off-peak times.

You were probably doing this anyway to be honest... there always is that lag before the UVM loads where things aren't so protected. So rebooting while users are hastily clicking refresh in a frustrated attempt to get their page to load isn't all that wise...

Anyway, here's some data off my 3 boxes I had in service I tested this with.

The first...

P3 933mhz, 1gb of ram, 2x Intel Pro 100 interfaces, Open Source Rack.

This unit was fine up until 6.0 was released, by the time we made it to 6.02 the thing was so slow it took a 5mb cable connection down to 512kb. I tried reinstall, I tried everything. The only way to make the box work at respectable speeds was to remove the AV module. And that I wasn't willing to do. I decided to retire the box because it simply wasn't pushing packets fast enough.

P4 1.7ghz, 1gb of ram, 2x Intel Pro 100 Interfaces, Pro and Open Source Rack.

This was my main site's UT since I started as a reseller. It like the other above started its life with 5.1. By the time we made it to 6.02 however, it was no longer capable of maintaining VoIP traffic over the VPN tunnel without the voice degrading. All other functions worked normally even after the upgrade to 6.1. This unit took 4.5 hours to upgrade from 6.02 to 6.1.

AMD Dualcore 2.5ghz, 1gb ram, 2x Intel Pro 100 Interfaces, 1x onboard realtek, Pro and Open Source.

This unit was purchased to upgrade the former listed unit, so I can use the former unit to replace its former unit. Simple rolled upgrade. It was installed 6.02 and ran that for about a week before the 6.1 release shipped. All my tunnel issues were resolved, everything was happy with the p4 at my satellite office, and the AMD here at main. This unit completed the 6.1 upgrade in 1.5 hours.

The odd thing is however, even that p4 boots up and is online in about 3 mins... it isn't that much longer than a standard windows boot on the same hardware.

How much ram are you guys playing with in those lower end boxes? If you're less than 1gb try tossing in some more. Ram is cheap, and it does wonders for Java.

[raditude]

Sky-knight - One of my boxes has 3gb the other only has 1gb, however both are P4's. When, not IF I see degradation like you noted with your VOIP over VPN, the company will have no choice, but for now the only negative impact noticed (and only by me as stated reboots are not done during normal hours) is the slower boot times.

[sky-knight]

Yeah, you know the sad thing is that I think the real issue boils back to multi-core... even my older XP stations that aren't dual are slowing down to unusable levels. Everything these days seems to want that horsepower.

If your issue is as Dmorris suggested the newer version of Java at least the performance hit will be only on boot. That is a good thing, at least. It will be nice when things start picking up again and people don't balk at the cost of a new box...

I have one client that needs a new laptop for a certain employee that does video/audio editing... the equipment she needs is $2500, the equipment they authorized is $800. I'm simply getting tired of people trying to make due with crap. They lose the money they save in productivity in the first 30 days of doing that kind of silliness.

In some ways I wish UT was more sonicwallish but that requires them to do hardware. Sonicwall solves this issue by forcing you to use "firmware" and they stop upgrading the boxes at a certain point because the hardware won't work correctly with the new software.

They are a BSD derivative, and in reality aren't that different under the hood than UT in several ways... but the point is that the hardware has an operational life. However, when UT says they are "software only" that puts the hardware part of the burden firmly on the system builders. Which means we either get to guess, or keep 1 model of each unit we sell around for testing. And make sure auto upgrades are turned off.

[lschafroth]

The odd thing is however, even that p4 boots up and is online in about 3 mins... it isn't that much longer than a standard windows boot on the same hardware.

If Windows takes longer than 45 seconds to boot then you have some cleaning and tweaking to do. Should never ever take over a minute to boot into XP or Vista, and even faster in W7.

Lannie

PS XP boots in under 45 seconds on a 1.5Ghz machine wtih 512Mb ram and old 40Gb drive.

[raditude]

I agree! As stated if it was effecting more than the boot I "might" be able to get them to consider buying new hardware, but the fact is in the couple of weeks it has been updated to 6.1, outside of a couple of reboots, there are no issues. It runs very well, low CPU, Ram & Disk usage (or well within acceptable IMO). Right now it is unfortunate but what I am seeing is if it ain't broke we are not fixing it (until things turn around).

Which I can understand since the unemployment stats were just released here (Oregon), and in the county I work/live in the rate is now over 14% (it was 6% same month last year), so everyone is just buckling down and holding status quo.....

[sky-knight]

If Windows takes longer than 45 seconds to boot then you have some cleaning and tweaking to do. Should never ever take over a minute to boot into XP or Vista, and even faster in W7.

Lannie

PS XP boots in under 45 seconds on a 1.5Ghz machine wtih 512Mb ram and old 40Gb drive.

Yes, you get to the desktop but that isn't' the same as "booted".

Microsoft is fudging the numbers there by presenting you a "working" desktop while doing a pile of crap in the background. The real question is how long does it take to turn on XP with 512mb SP3 and all current software and AV and get a SMOOTH desktop. That is somewhere around 3min.