Disabling start of services at boot

Question

Okay, I think these questions might have been asked a lot, but I haven't really found a detailed answer yet (If there is one, please enlighten me ;)).

• Which services absolutely NEED to be started at system boot? (e.g. I get the feeling that I don't want XRDP all the time, but only when I want to control my Pi via RDP, yet the service is started at boot)
• With services like XRDP (which are only really doing anything when actively used), do they consume processing power at all when idling somewhere in the system's backyard (I actually don't know what services do in their free time ^^), so does it even matter if they run or not?
• And finally, what is the cleanest solution to prevent services from starting at system boot?

(By the way, you are dealing with a Windows user here, so keep your answers simple :P)

Answer 1

Stop worrying about system services.

They will only take CPU time if they are active. Normally they will be dormant waiting for an event.

Of course they will occupy a little memory but if you run short of memory they will be automatically paged out to the SD card.

Answer 2

You can disable all services you don't use using the command

update-rc.d -f the-service remove

Most of the services do not do anything when they are not used. For example, Apache (webserver) is sleeping when no client request a page. However, some services could do some background tasks and consume CPU cycles, in addition to the memory footprint of the software.

For a "desktop" like use, you should not worry about running services. But if you use your raspberrypi as a server, or embedded device,... it is always safer and more robust to only start services and software you actually need.

Answer 3

disable some services with update-rc.d -f your-service-to-disable remove or use crontab and put this in filename.sh then service your-service-to-disable stop and in crontab use @reboot /path/to/filename.sh