profile/speed-up boot and login time?

[Matt Price]

Hi,

I'm running ubuntu precise on my thinpad 410 laptop; the machine is a
couple of years old now, so has been through the ubuntu upgrade
process a number of times and has a bunch of non-standard packages on
it.  When I first got it it seemed lightning fast to boot up; now the
boot process seems slower and slower and slower, especially the time
from login prompt to workable system (wireless activated, thunderbird
up and running, not switching so heavily you can't drag the mouse...).

I imagine there are many possible causes, including cruft from earlier
ubuntu versions and failed past experiments.  Disk usage is high but I
would think not crippling:

matt at roke:~$ df -h
Filesystem           Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5             38G   22G   14G  61% /
udev                 2.8G  4.0K  2.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs                1.2G  968K  1.2G   1% /run
none                 5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                 2.8G  1.9M  2.8G   1% /run/shm
/dev/sda6            225G  199G   26G  89% /home
/home/matt/.Private  225G  199G   26G  89% /home/matt

both / and /home are ext4, though my home directory is also encrypted
with ecryptfs and mounted with fuse(the default encryption option from
whenever I first installed ubuntu on this thing -- not sure if it's
deprecated now or still in common use).

I wonder

(1) what tools I might use to figure out which parts of the startup
cycle are slowest, -- i know there used to be boot profilers people
used, but do they also handle the period after GDM/LDM starts up?
(2) if there are generic things I can do (defrag my drive? I thought
that was unnecessary these days) to improve boot time

ordinarily i don't worry so much about boot time, but lately this
machine has taken to crashing on resume about 1 out of 10 times, so
i'm rebooting a lot more often now...
g
Thanks,
matt
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