Despite constant advances in hardware performance, the time it takes to log in to GNOME has not improved much in recent years. This work examines the causes of slow startup time using a combination of existing and ad-hoc tools and evaluates possible solutions.

The analysis shows that GNOME startup time is I/O bound and dominated by disk seeks, and that there is much room for improvement: proof-of-concept modifications made to GNOME code and to system code resulted in a more than 30% reduction in startup time.

The work also shows how trivial modifications to the dynamic linker to load libraries from disk sequentially instead of faulting them into memory can bring a relatively large benefit in application startup time.