Boot times

While I'm dumping thoughts from CLS, Dan Allen had a great thought on boot / startup times which he mentioned while he was showing me the awesome work his team had been doing on optimizing the startup time of JBoss AS7. Quite a few people have pointed out that a startup time of a minute versus a startup time of ten seconds isn't really a big deal on something you only start maybe once a day, yet people seem to be really sensitive to it. Dan pointed out that the difference between ten seconds and a minute is the difference between you just sitting there and waiting for it, versus getting bored and starting something else. If your system takes ten seconds to boot, you press the button and wait; if it takes a minute, you press the button then go fill the time by making a coffee or something. Then you get into a conversation with the mail carrier, trip over the dog, realize your yak needs a shave...so the one minute startup time winds up being more like a three, five or even ten minute startup time. I'd never thought about it that way, but he's dead right.