I have a pretty decent laptop (Intel Core i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz, SataII SSD from Samsung, 8GB Ram), but I not satisfied with my boot and shutdown times...
I have installed bootchart, and am trying to interpret it, but I don't understand some parts.

In particular, I don't get what is happening during the first 10 seconds, when there is almost no CPU utilization, nor I/Os. What is happening then ? (there seem to be only udevd, modprobe and plymouth running).

On the other end of my daily work, I also experiente slow shutdown. No shotdown chart here, so I'm even more clueless...

Update
I have come accross a hint saying hitting the up key while shutting down gives access to the console (I had been fighting with F1 / Alt F1 before that). So I have seen that the long shutdown time seems to have to do with rpcbind and modem-manager being unable to quit cleanly... Any idea?

Update 2
I have uninstalled rpcbind, as well as modemmanager. This made things better for shutdown, but I still have several seconds waiting between the 'All processes ended within 1 seconds' message, and the real shutdown. Just then, I get a quick message I was unable to read yet, but I suspect some sort of timeout to occur...

Update 3
Ok, I think I have narrowed things down to the execution of resume and wait-for-root during the first 10 seconds of the boot process. This is taking more than 5 secs, with no disk nor noticable CPU activity. I noticed that swap UUID in /etc/initramfs/conf.d/resume does not match with the real UUID of my swap partition, which happens to be... crypted. Maybe that is the point ? Any hint on initramfs-tools and cryptswap ?