Maybe I did forget to mention: The error seems to occur only as part of system start, while many tasks run in parallel. I did recognize this only because command apropos did not give any results. Here are top 5 lines of output of systemd-analyze blame 1min 8.819s mandb.service 1min 8.238s mlocate.service 26.635s clamd.service 23.526s backup-rpmdb.service 21.007s logrotate.service The astonishing result is, that mandb.service is listed in top, even before mlocate.service and clamd.service! mandb.service is NOT part of critical chain! I guess the performance issue of mandb.service triggers timeouts on read statement (-t 1) and thus hinders mandb.service to successfully complete its job. And running do_mandb from the command line after boot does not give more insight, as it runs fine in this state if the system.