On Wednesday 2021-10-20 00:01, Larry Len Rainey wrote:

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/561075-Some-Applications-take-30-...

Slow rotating hard disk in 2 of them? :D

Any ideas on how to find the slowness in loading?

top, to see if it's doing something with the CPU, or waiting for I/O. strace, to see if it is waiting on some whacko network request, or if it is opening loads of files / one file and then spending the remainder of its CPU time on that file. If I had $5 to gamble, I'd put it on (blaming) fontconfig.

Am 20.10.21 um 00:01 schrieb Larry Len Rainey:

I have posted in the forum for help but have not gotten anything that helped - I would love to find a way to see why. I know this is not the right way but I hope someone has an idea why and or how to find the problem and fix it.

First of all, does it consume CPU in those 30 seconds or not? * If it does, you could try some profiling with "perf". (From the package of the same name.) So run e.g. "perf record vlc", then close VLC after it has started. Then run "perf report" to get an idea where the most time is spent. * More likely it doesn't and instead waits. That's a bit more difficult but not insurmountable. Install bcc-tools and kernel-devel, then run "sudo /usr/share/bcc/tools/offcputime -p $PID", where $PID is the pid of the relevant process. (The script might be slow to start. If that's the case, run without "-p $PID" and instead filter the stacks after the fact for vlc or whatever program you're running.) Then paste the results here, just the top symbols for perf or the bottom results for offcputime (the longest waits come last) or open a bug right away if you think you know the culprit. In fact opening a bug report isn't the worst idea, even if you don't have any idea what component is at fault. Possibly it's some mutexes though, i.e. user space waiting for user space, which could get a bit harder. Best regards, Aaron

Hi, Am Mittwoch, 20. Oktober 2021, 00:01:30 CEST schrieb Larry Len Rainey:

I have posted in the forum for help but have not gotten anything that helped - I would love to find a way to see why. I know this is not the right way but I hope someone has an idea why and or how to find the problem and fix it.

Maybe a trace/truss could point out the cause of the delay (not my thing trying to understand trace/truss is beyond my knowledge) - my thing is scripting bash to do what is needed without input. I haven't code C in years (1988 was the last year and on 68020 based Unix).

You can try "strace -tT leafpad", if it's a syscall taking that long. It might be something in the event loop though, in which case the output won't be helpful. Usually long timeouts like this are either blocking DBus calls which aren't answered (broken service) or network related. For the former you can try watching "dbus-monitor" while starting an application, for the latter the usual suspects are the X11 display and session management. Is xterm also affected? Does it vanish after "unset SESSION_MANAGER"? Is the machine reachable under its assigned hostname(s)? Cheers, Fabian

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/561075-Some-Applications-take-30-...

I don't think it is the desktop as I loaded gnome and still had the issue

Background 15.3 with MATE desktop.

I have 10 nearly identical Dell 7490 laptops all i5-8350U cpu (different dates of manufacturing, different ram brands - all same spec, all with 1tb nvme drives - 2 of each the same ram brand and nvme brand)

on 2 different laptops - virtualbox and leafpad takes 30 seconds to load - running has no issues.

on the same 2 laptops - vlc takes 36 seconds to load - videos play fine as do mp3's.

I did an ldd and checked the sum of all the libraries on the good and the problem machines and they are the same.

One of the problem laptops is the one that I use to validate that my backup /restore code is good.

Since all 10 are clones of one another, I don't understand why the slowness - nothing in the journalcfg showing any errors.

the only hardware difference is the main laptop with the problem has thunderbolt usb3.1 the other does not have thunderbolt and the other thunderbolt laptop is fine.

Everything works but starting VirtualBox and VLC takes over 30 seconds.

I have tries everything on the internet to fix either one - deleting all files fir them in .config .local and .cache did not fix the problem.

All the setting on vlc that work fine - I rsynced to the main problem machine - no change.

Any ideas on how to find the slowness in loading?

On Wednesday 2021-10-20 00:01, Larry Len Rainey wrote:

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/561075-Some-Applications-take-30-...

Slow rotating hard disk in 2 of them? :D

Any ideas on how to find the slowness in loading?

top, to see if it's doing something with the CPU, or waiting for I/O. strace, to see if it is waiting on some whacko network request, or if it is opening loads of files / one file and then spending the remainder of its CPU time on that file. If I had $5 to gamble, I'd put it on (blaming) fontconfig.

Am 20.10.21 um 00:01 schrieb Larry Len Rainey:

I have posted in the forum for help but have not gotten anything that helped - I would love to find a way to see why. I know this is not the right way but I hope someone has an idea why and or how to find the problem and fix it.

First of all, does it consume CPU in those 30 seconds or not? * If it does, you could try some profiling with "perf". (From the package of the same name.) So run e.g. "perf record vlc", then close VLC after it has started. Then run "perf report" to get an idea where the most time is spent. * More likely it doesn't and instead waits. That's a bit more difficult but not insurmountable. Install bcc-tools and kernel-devel, then run "sudo /usr/share/bcc/tools/offcputime -p $PID", where $PID is the pid of the relevant process. (The script might be slow to start. If that's the case, run without "-p $PID" and instead filter the stacks after the fact for vlc or whatever program you're running.) Then paste the results here, just the top symbols for perf or the bottom results for offcputime (the longest waits come last) or open a bug right away if you think you know the culprit. In fact opening a bug report isn't the worst idea, even if you don't have any idea what component is at fault. Possibly it's some mutexes though, i.e. user space waiting for user space, which could get a bit harder. Best regards, Aaron