Hang starting some apps

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi there,

Experiencing this on Tumbleweed and Leap 15.4.

I use xfce as a desktop environment and lightdm as a displaymanager.
Tumbleweed is a AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, 32GB RAM, 500GB NVME SSD
Leap 15.4 is an intel i3-8100, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVME SSD
So neither should be slow…

When I launch several applications e.g. evince and firefox are the two I have found so far, they take approx 30 seconds to appear.

I did an strace on evince, and it seemed to hang for 25 seconds at one point before continuing.

Since it also takes longer to login (to xfce)** than I would expect, again around 30 seconds I suspect that something running during login is also experiencing this problem. This happens for all users so unlikely to be user related.

**Logins on the console are pretty much instant.

Does anyone have any clues as to what be the problem here?
Feel free to prompt for additional information.

Cheers.

Phill.

#2

If you know how to use strace (good!) did you notice where it was waiting for?

#3

Is it always happening or just “occasionally”? In the latter case, if you are you using a BTRFS file system, it may just be doing it’s “homework” i.e. balance, scrub, trim etc. routine. It can be a bit of a nuisance but I didn’t change the settings, I just let it go by.

#4

I’ve shared the strace log here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/d7zdnvwglflw5vq/evince_strace2.txt?dl=0

It looks to be hanging on this poll call :

10:11:24.087009 poll([{fd=11<anon_inode:[eventfd]>, events=POLLIN}], 1, 25000) = 0 (Timeout) <25.016102>

Cheers.

Phill.

#5

Agreed, it is this poll timeout that seems to be the culprit. It is for fd (File Descriptor) 11 and I filtered lines related to that.

10:11:24.086243 openat(AT_FDCWD</tmp>, "/usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libhandy.mo", O_RDONLY) = 11</usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libhandy.mo> <0.000013>
10:11:24.086275 newfstatat(11</usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libhandy.mo>, "", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=23592, ...}, AT_EMPTY_PATH) = 0 <0.000010>
10:11:24.086304 mmap(NULL, 23592, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 11</usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libhandy.mo>, 0) = 0x7f8e8c53b000 <0.000015>
10:11:24.086336 close(11</usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libhandy.mo>) = 0 <0.000008>
  1. The file /usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libhandy.mo is opened as read-only.
  2. The stats for that file are queried
  3. contens of the file are mmap-ed
  4. The file descriptor is closed
10:11:24.086838 eventfd2(0, EFD_CLOEXEC|EFD_NONBLOCK) = 11<anon_inode:[eventfd]> <0.000011>
10:11:24.087009 poll([{fd=11<anon_inode:[eventfd]>, events=POLLIN}], 1, 25000) = 0 (Timeout) <25.016102>
  1. An Event notification file descriptor is created reusing the earlier fd 11. It’s counter is initialized to 0
  2. A poll is done and that will only return if that counter (that was initialized to 0) has a value greater than 0.

I think another process should update that counter to indicate something but without a good log it is hard to know what that is.

#6

I think I’ve solved it, apparently it’s a bug in xdg-desktop-portal-gnome detailed here :

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=285590

Long story short : running

systemctl --user mask xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Seems to have fixed it.

Cheers.

Phill.

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