Slow boot on Fedora 16: why and how to improve?

Question

I recently installed Fedora 16 on a Dell VOSTRO 1510. I am quite happy with it, but I am concerned with the slow boot load time. I measured from launching the OS with GRUB till GDM, a boot load time of 1:01.42, which I experience as slow (that's subjective, my bad: I have not measured other boot times in prior Ubuntu installations, but I remember it to be half that time).

Pressing F2 during boot prints out various details. I notice the boot load is taking much time in the following phase:

Started LSB: Starts and stops login ISCSI daemon.
Starting LSB: Starts and stops login and scanning of ISCSI devices.

What is LSB, ISCSI? Is one minute indeed a long boot time? Can I somehow improve the boot load time?

Here is my bootchart for more details:

Edit: thanks to some more documentation suggested by @vasquez, I have been able to remove some services and reduce boot time using systemd-analyze and systemctl. There are still more services however, which I may need to remove,see below. But how to know what services is doing what and gauge whether I need it or not?

 13067ms udev-settle.service
  4622ms fedora-loadmodules.service
  3539ms systemd-vconsole-setup.service
  2913ms remount-rootfs.service
  2620ms media.mount
  2603ms sys-kernel-debug.mount
  2595ms dev-hugepages.mount
  2587ms sys-kernel-security.mount
  2577ms dev-mqueue.mount
  2025ms udev-trigger.service
  1951ms fedora-readonly.service
  1763ms netfs.service
  1619ms mdmonitor-takeover.service
  1598ms fcoe.service
  1570ms udev.service
  1267ms systemd-remount-api-vfs.service
  1214ms fedora-storage-init.service
  1018ms sys-kernel-config.mount
   950ms plymouth-start.service
   833ms systemd-sysctl.service
   440ms NetworkManager.service
   391ms avahi-daemon.service
   324ms rsyslog.service
   268ms systemd-logind.service
   262ms console-kit-log-system-start.service
   249ms fedora-storage-init-late.service
   231ms livesys.service
   228ms ip6tables.service
   224ms iptables.service
   206ms auditd.service
   193ms sshd-keygen.service
   184ms systemd-readahead-replay.service
   183ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
   175ms irqbalance.service
   173ms systemd-readahead-collect.service
   167ms boot.mount
   145ms abrt-vmcore.service
   138ms mcelog.service
   136ms dbus.service
   122ms abrt-ccpp.service
    90ms lvm2-monitor.service
    52ms fedora-wait-storage.service
    51ms sandbox.service
    44ms console-kit-daemon.service
    30ms livesys-late.service
    22ms home.mount
    11ms systemd-user-sessions.service
     9ms accounts-daemon.service
     5ms rtkit-daemon.service
     0ms sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount

Edit: After removing the following services:

• sendmail.service
• sm-client.service
• iscsi.service
• udev-settle.service
• fedora-wait-storage.service

Boot went from 1m 1.5s to about 26s (hurray) see plots:

Before

After

Now the fedora-storage-init.service is taking the most time and removing it only replaces it by fedora-storage-init-late.service. What is this service exactly doing and how it can be sped up is yet a mystery.

Answer 1

It would be worth a try to run systemd-analyze blame, see http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/blame-game.html and https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/539856-more-systemd-fun-the-blame-game-and-stopping-services-with-prejudice.

Those articles also show how to find culprits for long boot time. One minute is too long on F16 as a desktop. I think you should be able to see 20-30 second boot ups.

Edit:

LVM does take a lot of time (that's your big initramfs time, but you probably can't get rid of it right away since that would mean a re-install. One services I think you could disable is fcoe.

Another idea from https://plus.google.com/u/0/108087225644395745666/posts/jaFyQtyjZLh :

Add libahci.ignore_sss=1 to the kernel cmd line:

Arjan van de Ven - +Kay Sievers you want to add "libahci.ignore_sss=1" to the kernel command line... your bios lies to you about the storage, costing you 0.6 seconds.