Does the size of your home directory affect startup performance?

Question

My home folder is 109 GB and I as wondering if this would affect startup performance and performance in general?

Answer 1

The size of your home folder, and of your connected drives in general, will generally not affect general performance. In theory, a larger drive could require some more time for checking, which would affect startup times. However, with journaling filesystems, such as the default filesystem ext4, this is not of any practical concern.

Answer 2

During boot your /home partition is mounted which takes a fraction of a second regardless of it's size.

After logging in there are programs which will index (or process) the files in your home partition. This will effect performance the first time the program is used. If properly designed, such programs should not lag your screen or keyboard. After files are indexed the first time, subsequent program usage will only incrementally update new files added.

Some example programs would be:

• Nautilus not generating thumbnails for GIF images
• How to stop a file or folder from being indexed in GNOME?

With a large home directory some commands will be slower such as find but the similar command locate will not be noticeably slower. find searches every file but locate has an index of every file stored in it's own database.