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I have had Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installed on my laptop for nearly 2 years and noted that startup has been getting slower over time. Here is what I have done so far to improve startup time:

  1. Cleared out the following locations (files only not directories):
    '/var/log'
    '/var/cache/apt/archives'
  2. At startup my screen started going blank for approx 40 secs,approx the same time as plymouth-quit-wait.service (splash) over time and incidentally for several months apport was reporting a _sbin_plymouthd.0.crash which appeared to eventually be fixed after a number of scheduled kernel updates, but after it was fixed the screen started going blank for approx 40 secs and kept occurring. I had never modified the grub bootloader and so it has always been set to the defaults on startup.

[Edited] I removed the part about the grub bootloader settings since I found none of the grub options made any difference and in any case, I forgot to run update-grub afterwards so I was never changing anything and it was nothing to do with any grub options.

After some further testing the blank screen in (2) above is something I found I introduced myself while disabling and enabling specific services while trying to speed up my system, I had disabled the avahi service, but forgot to re-enable when I was done testing and if this is disabled at startup this appears to cause the screen to go blank for around 40 seconds.

As a result. of (1) above I have improved my startup time significantly and it is now: 

  ~$ systemd-analyze time 
Startup finished in 3.912s (kernel) + 1min 25.875s (userspace) = 1min 29.788s
graphical.target reached after 1min 23.660s in userspace

~$ systemd-analyze critical-chain
graphical.target @1min 23.660s
└─multi-user.target @1min 23.660s
  └─kerneloops.service @51.738s +127ms
    └─network-online.target @51.722s
      └─NetworkManager-wait-online.service @43.696s +8.024s
        └─NetworkManager.service @36.659s +7.032s
          └─dbus.service @32.763s
            └─basic.target @32.644s
              └─sockets.target @32.644s
                └─snapd.socket @32.642s +768us
                  └─sysinit.target @32.527s
                    └─apparmor.service @27.457s +5.007s
                      └─local-fs.target @27.457s
                        └─run-user-121.mount @49.661s
                          └─local-fs-pre.target @6.087s
                            └─systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service @4.597s +1.489s
                              └─kmod-static-nodes.service @4.466s +129ms
                                └─systemd-journald.socket @4.465s
                                  └─system.slice @4.465s
                                    └─-.slice @4.436s

~$ systemd-analyze blame |head -10
 39.898s plymouth-quit-wait.service
 21.404s dev-sda2.device
 17.689s systemd-journal-flush.service
 13.880s snapd.service
 10.733s networkd-dispatcher.service
 9.775s ModemManager.service
 8.560s dev-loop10.device
 8.426s dev-loop18.device
 8.101s dev-loop15.device
 8.064s udisks2.service

Having migrated from Windows which doesn't automatically clean up temp files and app cache and therefore the following slow Windows down with the size increase over time:

  • Temporary/archived files
  • App Cache.
  • Profile size.
  • 2
    Before I asked this question I ran a search for this problem but didn't find any existing answers, but I just checked again today and found the following question and the top answer is what I was looking for and therefore my question can be regarded as a duplicate of: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1105808/extremely-slow-ubuntu-18-04-boot-time –  Nov 08 '19 at 09:56

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