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On my systems it takes sometimes a few seconds to get an address, especially wirelessly. If it fails to get an address (for whatever reason), it may take 30 seconds or so before it gives up. Depending on the OS/Distro, if these task are done serially that can be a significant slowdown.
To me, the biggest speed-up is for most of these tasks to be done in parallel - thus our case of a failed dhcp request wouldn't matter.
Hmm, well, I haven't tried too many different distros but Mandriva does dhcp in the background and so does Ubuntu (not that I use the latter one..). The whole point is that _if_ it happens to take some time to get a response then the process can just idle in the background, it does not need to be blocking other services from starting up. Especially since it consumes virtually no CPU time.
To me, the biggest speed-up is for most of these tasks to be done in parallel - thus our case of a failed dhcp request wouldn't matter.
If you are using something like ifplugd then this isn't an issue
Edited 2008-07-31 07:08 UTC





Member since:
2005-07-06
[q#7: Avoid dhcp: This one I was wondering what the heck was the author thinking? The answer to dhcp requests arrives in milliseconds (unless there's something terribly wrong with your system) and it allows for much more flexibility. [/q]
On my systems it takes sometimes a few seconds to get an address, especially wirelessly. If it fails to get an address (for whatever reason), it may take 30 seconds or so before it gives up. Depending on the OS/Distro, if these task are done serially that can be a significant slowdown.
To me, the biggest speed-up is for most of these tasks to be done in parallel - thus our case of a failed dhcp request wouldn't matter.