How can I speed up boot on Ubuntu 19.10? (19.10 boots much slower than 19.04 on same machine)

Question

Edit: The boot on Ubuntu 19.04 was super-fast, but with 19.10 the boot is taking around 2 minutes.

systemd-analyze gives

Startup finished in 9.736s (kernel) + 1min 36.475s (userspace) = 1min 46.211s 
graphical.target reached after 1min 36.225s in userspace

When I time the startup, it takes about 15 secs to get to the hang:

Started update utmp about system runlevel changes

(This suggests perhaps that utmp is not the problem - as the start of it is complete?) The screen then pauses for around 90 secs before arriving at the login, in line with the above values.

The recent ubuntu update (2019-12-08) claims to have improved things (?)

systemd-analyze 
Startup finished in 14.590s (kernel) + 4.267s (userspace) = 18.857s 
graphical.target reached after 4.252s in userspace

However, despite these different values, the overall boot time of nearly 2 minus is not changed. So not sure why systemd-analyze reports it like that.

Changes I have tried: At the top of the list was NetworkManager-wait-online.service, so I did:

sudo systemctl mask NetworkManager-wait-online.service

(see https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=282437). While that removes time from NetworkManager-wait-online.service, it doesn't lead to a speedup overall.

Crossposted here: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2432769&p=13915111#post13915111

Answer 1

This isn't really an answer - but, with recent updates (as of 2019-12-22), the problem has gone away. The stats reported by systemd-analyze are

Startup finished in 11.021s (kernel) + 4.453s (userspace) = 15.474s 
graphical.target reached after 4.438s in userspace

and they are now accurate.