Make Ubuntu Start Up Faster on Multi-Core Computers

This is a nice quick one. I run an Ubuntu quad-core at home and was looking to find a way to get it to start up faster by making better use of the multiple cores. So, I was looking through /etc/init.d/rc, which is a config file for the program that handles the startup and shutdown of daemons on an Ubuntu box, and found this line:

CONCURRENCY=none

Change it to this:

CONCURRENCY=shell

And then restart your machine:

sudo shutdown -r now

You’ll notice that it’ll start up faster, as it’ll run several of the startup scripts concurrently. This only works on multi-core systems, mind you – doing this on a single-core system will make the startup sloooow. You can then optimise the boot order to make things faster, but I’ll maybe leave that for another blog post, as it’s a bit more complicated (you have to take things like script sequence numbers and possible dependencies into account)