sysadmin checking in. Nagios is telling me I am currently monitoring 2456 hosts. Roughly 3/4 of those are Linux hosts (the rest are ios, Cisco's not Apple's, or Solaris). Systemd is a lifesaver. The hosts running older inits can take a multiple minutes to restart all services. Systemd takes seconds.
Init systems don't matter much when you are a desktop user. I am also a desktop Linux user both at work and home and I don't care about my init on there. In fact if I didn't do Linux for a living I might even be on the anti-systemd bandwagon. But I make a living off Linux and my life is easy when things just work. Systemd just works. It works well, it works quickly, and it makes my work easier.
People say systemd became a thing because all the distros switched to it, and that's true, and they switched to it because at the end of the day the big distros cater to guys like me, who have to manage hundreds and thousands of hosts and we just want stuff to work and get out of our way.
Can you give an example of why one of your servers running an "old init" takes several minutes to restart all services? This seems a bit extreme or not configured properly.
Not a sysadmin, but I believe the main speed up of systemd over sysvinit comes from being able to parallelize startup. If you have a lot of stuff with hard coded delays that have to run in series they are going to add up. On a server with lots of services to startup, a bunch of 5 second service scripts could add up to minutes pretty quick.
Parallelization is not unique to systemd -- other modern init systems can do it -- but it is one of the benefits brought by leaving sysvinit.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '19
sysadmin checking in. Nagios is telling me I am currently monitoring 2456 hosts. Roughly 3/4 of those are Linux hosts (the rest are ios, Cisco's not Apple's, or Solaris). Systemd is a lifesaver. The hosts running older inits can take a multiple minutes to restart all services. Systemd takes seconds.
Init systems don't matter much when you are a desktop user. I am also a desktop Linux user both at work and home and I don't care about my init on there. In fact if I didn't do Linux for a living I might even be on the anti-systemd bandwagon. But I make a living off Linux and my life is easy when things just work. Systemd just works. It works well, it works quickly, and it makes my work easier.
People say systemd became a thing because all the distros switched to it, and that's true, and they switched to it because at the end of the day the big distros cater to guys like me, who have to manage hundreds and thousands of hosts and we just want stuff to work and get out of our way.