Slow startups [was "Re: xfs slow startup"]

[Chris Chabot]

Actually when i do a strace on something 'simple' as an eog i get:
- 3488 fopen()'s
- 4684 stat()'s

A lot of the fopens seem to be caused by the .so linker looking into a
lot of places that don't even exist on my system:

open("/usr/X11R6/lib/tls/i686/sse2/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/tls/i686/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/tls/sse2/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/tls/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/i686/sse2/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/i686/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/sse2/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/libpopt.so.0", O_RDONLY) = 3

If it would fopen in /usr/lib right away that would save a huge amount
of the fopen calls, anyone know why it does such a thing? Would save
about 700 fopen calls right away

1091 calls are for /usr/share/fonts/.... Where if i do a "find -type f |
wc -l" i have only 539 files; Might be an X 'design flaw' it has to
rescan this every time, but it makes having fonts quite expensive :-) I
actually nuked most of my extra fonts i used to have (few hundred ttf's)
to gain a littlebit of responsiveness again.

About 1288 fopen()'s lead to a ENOENT, just checking for files that
_could_ exist (like those weird i686/tls/sse2 dir's and also mucho font
subdirs that don't exist like
"/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1/resource.frk"), if we already know what so's
we have (ld.so.cache / prelink) and we already know what fonts we
have .. Why spend so much time on secondguessing it? Well thats just my
feeling, not my technical insight :-)

Anyhow, no i don't think that blog post has caused everything to be
changed yet no :-)

	-- Chris

On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 00:52 +0100, David Nielsen wrote:
> lør, 28 01 2006 kl. 22:59 +0100, skrev Chris Chabot:
> > Same here, its because it rebuilds the font lists on startup every
> > time. Seems to add many seconds to an otherwise decent boot time :-)
> > 
> > Because i know i'm not adding or removing fonts any time soon i've
> > 'fixed' xfs to:
> > #[ -x /usr/sbin/chkfontpath ] && buildfontlist
> > 
> > (add the # before it to stop it from rebuilding the fontlists every
> > boot, saves tons of time :-))
> 
> I thought, reading Dave Jones' blog that this was fixed as a result of
> his wonderful investigations into the massive insanity that seems to be
> going on during e.g. boot.
> 
> http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/35270.html
> 
> -- 
> Obligatory shameless blog plug - the GNOME commentary located at:
> www.lovesunix.net/blog
> 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/attachments/20060129/a1ff8ceb/attachment.sig>