About

Bootchart is a tool for performance analysis and visualization of the GNU/Linux boot process. Resource utilization and process information are collected during the boot process and are later rendered in a PNG, SVG or EPS encoded chart.

The project started as a response to a challenge posted by Owen Taylor on the Fedora development mailing list:

"The challenge is to create a single poster showing graphically what is going on during the boot, what is the utilization of resources, how the current boot differs from the ideal world of 100% disk and CPU utilization, and thus, where are the opportunities for optimization."

Bootchart provides a shell script to be run by the kernel in the init phase. The script will run in background and collect process information, CPU statistics and disk usage statistics from the /proc file system. The performance data are stored in memory and are written to disk once the boot process completes.

The boot log file is later processed using a Java application (or the web form) which builds the process tree and renders a performance chart in different formats:

Sample boot chart
SVG   EPS

The chart can then be analyzed to examine process dependency and overall resource utilization.

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