&gt; Non-deterministic boot order (man 7 bootup) is one of many undesirable trade-offs.<p>Yeah, also something I found annoying with Upstart&#x27;s induction into Ubuntu.<p>A predecessor at a place I worked at with a huge amount of traffic installed Ubuntu 9 on all of our memcache servers, and we found on a handful of other machines installed with Ubuntu 9 that non-deterministic boot order would randomly cause them to fail booting, and it was a coin-flip whether that would be a one-off problem or a forever problem requiring a reinstall.<p>When you have 4 8GB machines (this was some years ago) powering memcache for a billion requests a day you don&#x27;t really want a power cycle to cause 25% cache misses for hours as you wrestle with hardware and boot config. :&#x2F;