# How long does a reboot usually take?



## Anon (Oct 28, 2012)

I just did the reboot command on my FreeBSD 8.1 server and am waiting over 10 minutes now for my server to come back online. How long does a reboot usually take?


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## wblock@ (Oct 28, 2012)

It should take less than a minute on a typical machine.  Some machines, particularly servers, have disk controllers that can take a long while to search for attached disks.  If you have external USB drives attached, some machines will try to boot from them, fail, and just sit there.


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## Anon (Oct 28, 2012)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> It should take less than a minute on a typical machine.  Some machines, particularly servers, have disk controllers that can take a long while to search for attached disks.  If you have external USB drives attached, some machines will try to boot from them, fail, and just sit there.



Thanks wblock@, what I ended up doing was going into my dedicated servers control panel on my hosts site and doing the reboot option from there instead of what I tried doing which was the reboot command via SSH. It ended up rebooting in like less than 3 minutes with my hosts reboot option.


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## wblock@ (Oct 28, 2012)

The "right" way to reboot is
`# shutdown -r now`

reboot(8) doesn't give all services a chance to shut down cleanly.  That may have been what was going on.


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## SirDice (Oct 29, 2012)

Please also update to 8.3, FreeBSD 8.1 is End-of-Life.

Also note, if you have SCSI controllers and disks a reboot might take a little longer. It takes a while to initialize all the disks.


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## Sfynx (Nov 5, 2012)

Here the biggest time sinks during boot are the SAS controller searching for its drives, and then the gptzfsboot crunching away at the storage pool to find the boot loader (I can imagine it is hard to examine a complex pool quickly with so little code). After the kernel starts booting, the thing flies.


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