When starting mate-terminal, gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, or whenever pinentry-gnome3 is invoked (used for SSH logins using hardware key), I have noticed that I'm waiting for 2-3 seconds more than I should.
Upon researching the issue, I found that something is causing the processes to loop through all possible file handles - which on this system defaults to about 8 million. This obviously takes some time.
When reducing openfiles to 65536 in /etc/login.conf, running cap_mkdb and rebooting, the impact of the problem is reduced to insignificance - everything feels snappy.
See attached output of truss -o xfce4term.log -f xfce4-terminal in a clean environment.
Make sure kern.maxfiles and kern.maxfilesperproc are set to defaults (in the ~8M range). I have not been able to confirm whether this has any actual impact, but I believe it informs the default openfiles limits.
Start mate-terminal or xfce4-terminal; there's a 1-3 second pause before the login scripts are run.
Describe the bug
When starting mate-terminal, gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, or whenever pinentry-gnome3 is invoked (used for SSH logins using hardware key), I have noticed that I'm waiting for 2-3 seconds more than I should.
Upon researching the issue, I found that something is causing the processes to loop through all possible file handles - which on this system defaults to about 8 million. This obviously takes some time.
When reducing openfiles to 65536 in /etc/login.conf, running cap_mkdb and rebooting, the impact of the problem is reduced to insignificance - everything feels snappy.
See attached output of
truss -o xfce4term.log -f xfce4-terminal
in a clean environment.xfce4term.log
How to reproduce the bug?
Make sure kern.maxfiles and kern.maxfilesperproc are set to defaults (in the ~8M range). I have not been able to confirm whether this has any actual impact, but I believe it informs the default openfiles limits.
Start mate-terminal or xfce4-terminal; there's a 1-3 second pause before the login scripts are run.
Expected behavior
Insta-prompt. :)