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Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

Interesting quote from his post "Our testing indicates that a typical Linux boot requires about 7,000 I/O operations and a typical Windows boot requires about 70,000."

I had assumed Linux was lighter-weight from casually observing the difference in boot times, but that's a 10x difference!

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I think that's a bit of a weird comparison: a "typical" Linux boot on a server usually doesn't involve bringing up a GUI, while on Windows you're always bringing the GUI up (right? I haven't touched Windows in years; maybe new Windows Server versions have a true headless option?). If you were to bring up X11 with a full-featured desktop environment on a Linux server, I imagine the I/O operation count would go up quite a bit.

not that I am aware of, but in the AWS case, that is a good use case to justify that as an option so to reduce the boot up time for auto scaling up

Windows Server has supported "Core" editions of its products back to 2008 where the UI is simply a login screen and command prompt for remotely-managed/headless operation. In my experience most Windows admins still prefer the GUI. And while it does obviously save some resources not to load the full UI, the cost of the additional cores/memory to run it is minimal by comparison.

My actual point (which I didn't make as strongly as I could because post too long already), was that the initial allocation of IOPS was more than sufficient to handle multiple boots of either Linux or Windows.

I wonder what effect SSD EBS will have on boot times.

"Switching from a Magnetic volume to a General Purpose (SSD) volume of the same size reduces the typical boot time for Windows 2008 R2 by approximately 50%."

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