Does high RAM capacity increase win boot time?!!

[MSH48]

Hi guys, I watched videos of people talking about Xeon or dual CPU motherboards and high capacity RAM like 128 GB or more increases boot time. Is that legit or they are just talking without knowing what they say??  

[zMeul]

it could be possible depending oh how the BIOS was set

BIOS will need to probe the RAM each time it boots so it stands to reason that the more RAM you have the longer it takes

[Arty]

I would say probably it would byt anyway, a system like that would very rarely be rebooted or turned off anyway. 

[xDylanio]

What's all of this "boot time" I have 32 gb and every time I shut down and turn on my pc it take like 10-15 seconds. Is that what you guys mean by boot time?

[vorticalbox]

11 minutes ago, MSH48 said:

Hi guys, I watched videos of people talking about Xeon or dual CPU motherboards and high capacity RAM like 128 GB or more increases boot time. Is that legit or they are just talking without knowing what they say??  

having dual cpus and a handful of drives and lots of ram probally would increase boot by a measurable amount.

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

having dual cpus and a handful of drives and lots of ram probally would increase boot by a measurable amount.

not the boot time, the bost time. The kernel and services startup will take the same amount of time.

[maz0r]

Assuming your running a standard Desktop OS, it should not make much difference how much RAM you have provided you have more than the minimum required (page files are still a thing), although bios settings can have an affect (i.e. test on startup type settings).

On the flip side Enterprise (Server) operating systems run more detailed checks on boot, to ensure system stability, and can take 2-minutes to boot on the "same" hardware.

[KenjiUmino]

10 minutes ago, zMeul said:

it could be possible depending oh how the BIOS was set

BIOS will need to probe the RAM each time it boots so it stands to reason that the more RAM you have the longer it takes

does BIOS still probe all the RAM like it used to in the pentium II days?

 

like back then it showed numbers counting up on screen during boot and when you had like 512 mb or more in there it could take a very long time to count up to that ...

 

but i have not seen a mainboard do something like that in ages

[maz0r]

1 minute ago, KenjiUmino said:

does BIOS still probe all the RAM like it used to in the pentium II days?

IIRC It usually just checks the memory controller and the memory profile and job done.

[zMeul]

1 minute ago, KenjiUmino said:

does BIOS still probe all the RAM like it used to in the pentium II days?

yes, depends on how it's set

and probing RAM thoroughly is especially good practice on servers

[Daniel Z.]

Storage is a much larger factor and I would assume that a high end Xeon machine would have a (or many) very capable SSD

[KenjiUmino]

2 minutes ago, maz0r said:

IIRC It usually just checks the memory controller and the memory profile and job done.

thats more what it looks like to me nowadays ... with ram sizes going through the roof again and again each new generation, it would take forever to count every byte of it each time you boot.

 

on the other hand, bad RAM would likely be noticed earlier this way - i'd trade a couple of seconds more on the boot time for a bit more peace of mind though ... seconds !!!! not minutes !!!

[vorticalbox]

6 minutes ago, KenjiUmino said:

thats more what it looks like to me nowadays ... with ram sizes going through the roof again and again each new generation, it would take forever to count every byte of it each time you boot.

 

on the other hand, bad RAM would likely be noticed earlier this way - i'd trade a couple of seconds more on the boot time for a bit more peace of mind though ... seconds !!!! not minutes !!!

in a server environment minutes is worth it having a stable server.

[KenjiUmino]

2 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

in a server environment minutes is worth it having a stable server.

right ... but you usually don't shut your server down every day before you go to bed 

[vorticalbox]

3 minutes ago, KenjiUmino said:

right ... but you usually don't shut your server down every day before you go to bed 

true but if it did go down I wouldn't mind a bit longer boot.