Server equipment... slow boot?

[eccerr0r]

Is it normal for servers to take an eon to boot?

I have two "server class" machines/boards now, with ECC RAM. Both take an eon and a half to boot.

The specific one I have is a Supermicro board with an atom c2550 chip in it. It takes forever, almost a minute before it initializes vga if at all (for some reason it doesn't even init the onboard VGA port, I have to stick in a PCIe card). Machine almost seems dead before then.

The other machine is an Itanium machine, likewise does not init VGA until at least a few minutes after power up.

Yes perhaps it's because I'm used to consumer quality equipment that initialize vga pretty much right away or at least a few seconds you can see BIOS startup, but is this normal for server class machines?

[momaka]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Good question.
Well, I do remember some old P4 Xeon servers used to take a while, but haven't done much with servers since then.

That said, my Dell Precision T-7500 workstation with ECC RAM also takes forever to boot... though not as long anymore, ever since I removed the 2nd CPU riser board (with extra RAM). It takes maybe 5-10 seconds or so before I get video output. Before that, it'd take around 20-ish seconds. Certainly not a minute or longer, though.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

just wanted to mention it's not because of the ECC ram, just a coincidence (as in coincidence is not causation). Still odd. As far as I know it's not testing ram during the dead time, or perhaps it is. I thought the Atom was dead at first because it didn't respond for so long.

I decided to let it wait and it finally sprung to live -- after i pulled all the RAM and got the expected beeping behavior when the first 64K RAM is dead, ever since the first PCs.

BTW this atom is slow...been over 2 hours and it still hasn't finished one pass of testing its mere 16GB of RAM.

[stj]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Atom is not a server cpu, it's a cutdown chip designed for tablets, school laptops and raspberry-pie type stuff

go into the bios and disable onboard video if your using a card - see what that does.
or check the vga settings related to stuff like shared ram

[Topcat]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Yes, perfectly normal for real server & workstation stuff. POST is slow. SAS & RAID controllers are slow....but once past all that, ready to rock.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Atom is actually quite often used for microservers. Again this is a Supermicro board (mATX), and it has standard full sized SATA and PCIe ports.

TBH there is no reason why a server should be so slow to initialize VGA and simply display POST status while booting, they have the same type of hardware as a client machine - the only exception theoretically is just RAM.

Should add that both the Itanium and this Atom board have IPMI, SOL, and console redirect... so it indeed is a server type board... I haven't decided yet whether to just completely run this atom headless if I can't get the vGa to work.

Damn my capitalization. I need to fix my keyboard.

[Topcat]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Atom is actually quite often used for microservers. Again this is a Supermicro board (mATX), and it has standard full sized SATA and PCIe ports.

Perfectly normal for a SM.

FWIW, I've found the atom to be fine for light duty servers. Once upon a time, this site ran on a Pentium 3.

[diif]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

No ammount of puff can make that a real server.
It's to make a networking device or a NAS.

[Topcat]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

It's to make a networking device or a NAS.

That would be a light duty server.

[diif]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

That's not enterprise then is it, it's a toy.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Now I wonder if I will notice anything if I swap this in for my old c2q "server" (it's a desktop machine used as a home server). The c2q is a faster machine for general purpose use, but this thing has more RAM (so I can run more VMs) and has AES-NI, so I don't need to worry about tossing my hard drives anymore when they fail...

[diif]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Is your motherboard on this list ? https://www.auvik.com/franklyit/blog...el-atom-c2000/

[eccerr0r]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

I guess if it's an intel c2000 chip it would be on that list, but would that not cause no POST at all? it does boot, just takes a while.

it also notices right away when there's no ram installed...

[diif]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

What motherboard do you have ?

[eccerr0r]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Heh, I think I found out how to implement that avr54 board level fix on my board, i think I'll go do it tomorrow as a proactive fix. Alas i don't think this is causing the slow boot as it would be a completely dead system versus slow boot, alas it shows that intel still fscks up designs.

[dmill89]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

That's not enterprise then is it, it's a toy.

There's been plenty of low-spec "enterprise" server gear over the years for specific use cases (such as a NAS/print server in a small branch office), case in point this HP Proliant Microserver I posted on the cheep/free awhile back, which HP specifically marketed as for offices with 10 clients or less.

HP Proliant Microserver
Specs:
CPU: AMD Turion II Neo N40L
GPU: integrated
RAM: 4GB DDR3-1600
HDD: none/removed, 4 3.5" bays
ODD: none
OS: none

I'm not sure how useful a server with an old laptop CPU is, but it is impressive how much HP managed to cram in that little box, 4 3.5" drive bays and a 5.25" bay, as well as 2 pic-e slots.

[Topcat]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

There's been plenty of low-spec "enterprise" server gear over the years for specific use cases (such as a NAS/print server in a small branch office), case in point this HP Proliant Microserver I posted on the cheep/free awhile back, which HP specifically marketed as for offices with 10 clients or less.

This.

Plenty of lower powered enterprise servers around.

[charleslam]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Supermicro boards tend to be slower at boot up. This extends to some HEDT and workstation boards as well. It also depends if you have memory testing enabled at boot, that can drastically extend boot times.

now that i think about it, i dont think i have ever owned a server board that would boot up right away like a consumer grade board would.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

Yeah, there's a lot of small specific purpose applications these slow server cpus will nicely fit. One thing they do not do is being part of compute farms for HPC, but if all they're doing is shuffling bits around (and even for this specific atom, encryption) it works very well.

I do wonder whether that proliant takes an eon and a half to at least initialize its video? i don't think hp uses supermicro or do they?

Currently building gcc (Gentoo) on this board to stress test. It's been chugging away at 100% CPU utilization, system is using about 42 watts right now though idles at around 39W (non 80+ PSU) - seems a bit high but it might be the old PSU. I think my single core atom cpu took around 12-16 hours to finish gcc, I suspect this should take less than a quarter of the time, will be interesting to see if it finishes it in an hour or so - 3 to 4 hours total.

[charleslam]

Re: Server equipment... slow boot?

I do wonder whether that proliant takes an eon and a half to at least initialize its video? i don't think hp uses supermicro or do they?

I dont think HP uses supermicro. HP does alot of other stuff though. IPMI comes to mind with HP (aka their ILO remote management stuff). really depends on the configuration, but yeah taking long at boot is par for the course in server world from what i can see.