slow boot: normal or configuration problem?

[GNUser]

Rich, you are a genius.

Boot time when my onboot.lst contains this:

Code: [Select]

Xorg-7.7.tcz
aterm.tcz
fluxbox.tcz
xf86-video-intel.tcz
Was 24 seconds in the original post. With the modified fontconfig.tcz (and fc-cache -sfv 1>/dev/null & in bootlocal.sh) it's now 10 seconds.

[Rich]

Hi GNUser

Rich, you are a genius. ...

I think that's pushing it. Let's just say that even a blind squirrel will find the occasional nut.

[GNUser]

Whatever you say

Thanks a lot for all your help. Needless to say, there's absolutely no way I would have cracked this without your help. I'll be educating myself about fontconfig...

Cheers,
Bruno

[GNUser]

BTW, I also use TCL on my netbook-turned-router (which is CLI-only, no X). It would boot slowly until I installed haveged.tcz on it.

haveged.tcz has been installed on my T400 laptop (the machine we've been troubleshooting) all along, and is started by bootlocal.sh. It's puzzling to me that haveged doesn't seem to help fontconfig get its random numbers. I wonder why.

Bottomline is that with or without X, low entropy can cause slow booting. haveged.tcz by itself seems to take care of the problem if the machine is CLI-only. If X is involved, it pulls in fontconfig.tcz as a dependency. Since fontconfig doesn't seem to be helped by haveged, best to put fontconfig's startup job in the background so that it doesn't hold things up.

[GNUser]

juanito and curaga: I'd like to suggest that

/usr/local/tce.installed/fontconfig in fontconfig.tcz be changed from

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh
fc-cache -sfv 1>/dev/null
to

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh
fc-cache -sfv 1>/dev/null &
I've tested the change and it dramatically* improves boot time, without any negative side effect as far as I can tell.

* Minimal onboot.lst: 10 sec boot time (vs. 24 sec without the change); very fat onboot.lst: 29 sec boot time (vs. 41 sec without the change).

[curaga]

Should be ok. I'd say remove the -v at the same time, no need for verbose when nobody sees the output.

[Juanito]

done in x86 and x86_64 repos

[GNUser]

Nice! Thank you.