Boot Time - Wow

[Richard]

Target: XPe SP1
Pentium 667mhz
256 MB CF
256 MB Ram
EWF Ram


My Normal Boot time is 95 seconds. However I played around yesterday and
divided my CF into two partitions. The first partition is 200 meg and the
second partition is 49 megs. I copied my same image over to the 200 meg
partition and noticed my boot times are now steady at 48 seconds. Nothing
changes at all besides for dividing the CF into two partitions.

Does EWF have to load the entire CF into Ram when it boots? Is there any
other logical reason why my boot time was dropped in half?

Richard

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Richard,

RAM EWF will actualy speed boot process since all writes are written to memory intead on CF medium. EWF is completely transparent to
all read requests and it does them either from memory for only changed data or from CF when data are not cached as changed blocks.

If you doubt at EWF then can you please try to boot system with EWF disabled and tell us boot time. I would be very suprised if EWF
has something to do with this boot problem.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Richard]

I think I worded by issue incorrectly.

I use EWF Ram Registry all the time. Booting from the same image and the
same CF Card. If the 256 mb CF has he entire drive formated as 249 mb then
my boot time is 95 seconds.

But If I divide my CF into two partitions (primary 200) and a second
Partition of 49 megs and copy the same exact image to the primary partition,
the boot time is reduced to 48 seconds.

Now My Question, if it's the same exact image, why are the boot times way
different. Both have EWF Ram Registry enabled.

Richard

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Richard,

Like I said if you doubt on EWF then you can disable it and see that it is probably not a problem.

What can be a problem is another issue on which I have no idea since I never saw it. FS has some load time different depending on
partition size size certain tables are bigger, but we would talk here in order of miliseconds and not on magnitude of 40 seconds
difference, so I'm preaty clueless.

Can you tell us if this time problem ocurs during the splash screen phase or before.

Splash screen phase go trough drivers and phase before is small load done by ntldr trough BIOS int 13 function.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Richard]

The time difference is from Power up to shell, then after
waitforPendingevents, to when the application actually loads.

I'll do some additional testing later and let you know what I find. I will
be preoccupied until next week. Thanks for the advice.

Richard

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Richard,

Oh you use waitforPendingevents in your aplication ok then you should get three times:
1. From Power to splash screen. (till ntldr is done with loading files and kernel is started).
2. From kernel init to your application start.
3. Wait in waitforPendingevents

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Mike Warren]

The time difference is from Power up to shell, then after
waitforPendingevents, to when the application actually loads.

I'll do some additional testing later and let you know what I find. I will
be preoccupied until next week. Thanks for the advice.

Richard,

That's an amazing time difference.

There isn't a network connected now where it wasn't before?
(Just offering another possibility)

-Mike

 

[Richard]

In both cases, network hooked up with the same static ip address set.
I will continue to play with it make smaller partitions and see if I have
better results.

Richard