Buggy network connection causes very low system responsiveness

[Colin Walters]

2008/3/24 Martin Sourada <martin.sourada at gmail.com>:
>
>  New strace, now with the -r option disabled. I caught the dead state for
>  about 2s or so, hope it is enough.
>
>  http://mso.fedorapeople.org/debug/gnome-terminal.log.gz (I replaced the
>  old one).

     0.000047 connect(10, {sa_family=AF_FILE,
path="/tmp/.ICE-unix/2371"}, 21) = 0
     0.000066 fcntl64(10, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
     0.000069 write(10, "\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8) = 8
     0.000171 read(10, "\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8) = 8
     8.482029 access("/home/martin/.ICEauthority", R_OK) = 0

We can see here that that read() took over 8 seconds to complete.
That read is it trying to talk via ORBit I think.  Which will try to
resolve "localhost", which if your /etc/hosts is busted will probably
take that long to timeout.

How to debug your /etc/hosts I'm not sure; maybe use the audit system
to monitor the file.  This page talks about that:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-audit-files-to-see-who-made-changes-to-a-file.html