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 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.
Just an idea for troubleshooting - you might have tried alread: Did you try starting the programs from a terminal window? There might be some helpful (error) messages? As different / new user?
30 sec is a long time. Maybe invoke some monitoring tool as top or a MATE pendant to ksysguard and try to see if the programs are calling something that is not available? Fust as example this the detailed memory usage shown by ksysguard:
Process 25995 - vlcSummaryThe process vlc (with pid 25995) is using approximately 33.0 MB of memory.
It is using 28.9 MB privately, and a further 61.3 MB that is, or could be, shared with other programs.
Dividing up the shared memory between all the processes sharing that memory we get a reduced shared memory usage of 4.1 MB. Adding that to the private usage, we get the above mentioned total memory footprint of 33.0 MB.
Library UsageThe memory usage of a process is found by adding up the memory usage of each of its libraries, plus the process's own heap, stack and any other mappings, plus the stack of its 7 threads.
Privatemore16204 KB[heap]2296 KB/usr/lib64/vlc/plugins/gui/libqt_plugin.so1964 KB/usr/lib64/libnvidia-glcore.so.390.144968 KB/usr/lib64/libvlccore.so.9.0.0736 KB/usr/lib64/libtag.so.1.17.0Sharedmore5180 KB/usr/lib64/libnvidia-glcore.so.390.1444596 KB/usr/lib64/libQt5Gui.so.5.12.73904 KB/usr/lib64/libQt5Widgets.so.5.12.73772 KB/usr/lib64/libQt5Core.so.5.12.72336 KB/var/tmp/#3269849 (deleted)TotalsPrivate29636 KB(= 6912 KB clean + 22724 KB dirty)Shared62748 KB(= 62728 KB clean + 20 KB dirty)Rss92384 KB(= Private + Shared)Pss33823 KB(= Private + Shared/Number of Processes)Swap0 KB
(I used the HTML tags as the dialog used tables which didn’t paste well.)
I wonder if trying something like this during the 30 secs could show what is not loaded? May be tedious, though.
30 seconds look like a timeout after waiting for …
I noticed that some applications (notably firefox and libreoffice) look for updates on the net during startup and sometimes (lazy DNS or what??) they take a while to load.
Interestingly, when that happens, switching off the network connection speeds things up (no net > no need to look up for updates and just start?).
Just an odd idea if you have nothing better to investigate.
yes - no errors from command prompt - I can add leafpad to the list of 30 second apps.
> vlc &
[1] 16149
VLC media player 3.0.13 Vetinari (revision 3.0.12.1-158-g6977abc430)
llrainey@LLR1:/a/u/Firefox> [000055c3e1ddb4c0] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[000055c3e1e663f0] main playlist: playlist is empty
>leafpad
>
I doubt that network has anything to do - libreoffice is quick to open.