[Solved] Certain applications take far too long to start.

[Saba9]

I know the title to this post is pretty vague but I'm not really sure how to put it any better. On my desktop I've noticed that certain applications take far longer to start then they should, this is on a system with a quad core AMD Phenom processor, 8 GB of RAM and root on an SSD. An example of an application that takes forever to load is the rails server, it takes about half a minute for the server to start whereas on my laptop with similar specs it only takes about 5 - 10 seconds max. Another application is Firefox which takes about 45 seconds to start. I would really appreciate help with this issue. Here's the output of running Firefox with strace (strace result). Also here's my kernel config and make.conf.If any other information is necessary I am more than willing to provide it. Thanks for the help!

[ideanl]

What are the specs for both the computers you've run firefox on. You said they were similar?

[albright]

have you tried installing firefox-bin to see if it suffers
the same lag (at least that would give more data
on the problem)?
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

[Saba9]

Thanks for the response albright, firefox-bin seems to suffer from the same problem taking approximately 42 seconds to start. To put this into perspective chromium takes about a second to start. ideanl, the laptop I was referring to in my original post has a dual-core Intel Core i7 processor, 6GB of RAM, and a 5400 RPM HDD.

[ideanl]

I would recommend comparing the strace ouputs of firefox-bin and firefox to see what is similar that might hint the problem to you. Also, try comparing those to your laptop that starts Firefox fairly quickly and that may present some differences that are notable.

[Chiitoo]

I'm probably the least of an expert here, but I'd add to what has been said that what first comes to my mind: do the processes actually use any CPU/IO while doing whatever it is they're doing, or are they more like waiting for something?

Just a thought!
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[666threesixes666]

@ original poster do 3.12.x branch of kernels suffer from this performance problem? as i have stated elsewhere i have extreme performance issues with 3.13.x slowed to a crawl, take 10 minutes to get the mouse from 1 side of the screen to the other.

[Saba9]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Chiito, it seems like the programs are waiting for something as they do not use any CPU/IO.

666threesixes666 unfortunately booting from a 3.12.x kernel (3.12.8 to be precise) does not help.

ideanl, one thing I've noticed when looking at the strace output is that both these programs take a considerable amount of time on the poll system call. The rails server also ran select multiple times each of these instances timing out. Although this does seem significant I'm not sure how to use this information to identify the root cause of the problem.

[i92guboj]

[mir3x]

Maybe try with strace something like that ( trace execution time):
>> strace -o firefox.output -r firefox-bin ( or firefox, then close firefox)

and then just sort by time

>> sort firefox.output

In my case top 10 time eating calls are for firefox:

0.041032 close(4 = 0
0.045348 close(24) = 0
0.049427 close(33) = 0
0.050979 read(21, "\372", 1) = 1
0.057903 futex(0x7fd7225f56cc, FUTEX_WAKE_OP_PRIVATE, 1, 1, 0x7fd7225f56c8, {FUTEX_OP_SET, 0, FUTEX_OP_CMP_GT, 1}) = 1
0.099914 read(21, "\372", 1) = 1
0.154235 read(21, "\372", 1) = 1
0.195798 read(21, "\372", 1) = 1
0.266783 read(21, "\372", 1) = 1
0.278616 recvmsg(4, {msg_name(0)=NULL, msg_iov(1)=[{"\n\0O\10y\0\200\5\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 4096}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 128
0.367223 recvmsg(4, {msg_name(0)=NULL, msg_iov(1)=[{"\241 V\nx\0\200\5)\1\0\0'\1\0\0\337\224\20\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 4096}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 64
0.516624 read(21, "\372", 1) = 1

When u compare your output you might guess whats wrong
_________________
Sent from Windows

[albright]

do you have ipv6 enabled?

somewhere on the internet it was suggested:

[mubai]

Saba9,
do you have any add-ons enabled? If so, could you try to disable all of them and see what happens? I noticed a slow down due to AdBlocker, and thought it could be related.

[Artux]

If the hdd led works all the time of the apps load then you might need to defragment or preload.

[vaxbrat]

I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, but a misconfigured /etc/resolv.conf will often cause this. It's one of the first things I look for when performance seems to go into the toilet. Any call that needs to do a host lookup will timeout while DNS tries to contact a server. If your primary is down, there's a builtin timeout before it moves on to the secondary and then tertiary server. It's on the order of seconds for each timeout. The lookup will look at /etc/hosts before going to DNS and those entries will always trump whatever DNS would have returned.

[Saba9]

vaxbrat, you are absolutely correct. I edited my resolv.conf to use Google's DNS instead of my router and now all previously mentioned applications start quickly. Thanks for the help everybody!