Re: Improving the performance of system boot by eliding unused rc.d scripts and caching the result

> On Aug 18, 2026, at 2:07 AM, Edgar Fuß <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Some of this was going into spawning sub-shells
> Did you try rc_fast_and_loose?

Yes, I even mentioned it in the bug report I filed to track the issue.  It saved some time (2 minutes out of 13), but did not have nearly the same impact because rc.d scripts do more than just cause sub-shells to be spawned.  Given that the setting has this warning:

#       NOTE:   USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK; A ROGUE COMMAND
#               MAY INADVERTENTLY PREVENT BOOT TO MULTIUSER.

it just doesn’t seem like the best solution to the problem.  (Slower *and* dangerous?  Maybe when I was younger, but certainly not now.)

It’s easy to see why rc_fast_and_loose isn’t that much faster:

icarus# rcorder -s nostart /etc/rc.d/* | wc -l
     128
icarus# wc -l /etc/rcorder.cache
      45 /etc/rcorder.cache
icarus# 

Not even visiting the files that do no useful work saves a lot more CPU cycles and I/O than throwing caution to the wind and slurping them all into a single process.

-- thorpej