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Boot times of various OSes on EeePC 901. How does TC stack up?

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paulfxh:
I have 7 OSes on my Asus EeePC 901 (4GB SSD+16GB SSD, 1GB RAM, Atom 1.6 GHz).
Over the last week or so I've been configuring TC 1.0 on this machine and it's now performing very well.
Here's a table showing the time to boot (from Grub menu to completely usable Desktop) and the space taken up on the HD for each OS:

--- Code: ---OS           Boot time (s)         Disk space (MB)
Haiku            12                         313
Senryu          12                         629
Puppy            25                         1100
Xandros        27                         3600
DSL 4.1.2       40                         325
TC (frugal)     70                          78
Ubuntu 8.04   84                         6300
--- End code ---
The dominant part of the TC boot time is the >50 seconds spent loading extensions and backup restoration.
This is by no means a completely scientific study and is just meant to provide a rough indication.
However, I'm surprised by how slow TC booting seems. Am I perhaps overlooking something that might speed things up?

Jason W:
The size of your backup and the number and size of the extensions that are being loaded are a major factor to the boot time of TC.  Without backup or extensions, or when using PPI mode, TC boots very fast.  One trick I used earlier is making one large tcz out of the extensions in my tce directory and I recall it speeding up things at boot.

Jason W:
Confirmed, my 60MB worth of extensions (including compiletc, perl_xml) loads in 30 seconds from the start of the first extension being loaded to the last.  The same extensions put in one large tcz loads in 13 seconds.   Simplest way to try this trick is to untar your tce's into a directory and make a tcz of that directory.  Tce-load takes into account multiple menu entries in a tcz so the menus get loaded ok.  A custom user.tar.gz may have to be created depending on which extensions are involved.  This may be of interest for those who want the fastest possible boot time.

paulfxh:
Thanks for those comments.
Although  getting a faster boot time in TC is by no means crucial for me, I'm interested to try your "trick" basically to learn some more about this OS.
However, as I'm a complete TC newbie when you say something like

--- Quote ---A custom user.tar.gz may have to be created depending on which extensions are involved
--- End quote ---
that went over my head, I get a little worried.
Any chance of a simple how-to?

Jason W:
First, combining tce's or tcz's is only good if there are no plans to install further tce/tcz's from the menu since all the extensions in the collection are not registered as installed.  Using the appbrowser will install extensions and their dependencies that are really already installed.  That will not normally cause problems, but it is a duplication of installation. 

To do this, download the extensions you want to combine in a directory.  Then make a directory inside that directory named "pkg" or something else.  Combine the extensions:

# tar xzvf extension.tce -C pkg
# tar xzvf extension2.tce -C pkg

Until they are all untarred in pkg.  Then make a tcz of the pkg directory, using the l or m suffix if needed depending on the extensions used:

# mkfs.cramfs pkg bigextension.tczlm

That will basically create one large extension out of many regular ones.  There are only a handful of extensions that need a user.tar.gz, and loading the individual extensions in tcz form and looking in /tmp/tcloop will tell which ones and what needs to be in there. 

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