*BSD News Article 36670


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From: durham@w2xo.pgh.pa.us (James C. Durham)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 Long log-in times
Keywords: FreeBSD Log ins
Message-ID: <31@w2xo.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 7 Oct 94 03:08:16 GMT
Organization: Jims Basement, Gibsonia,PA
Lines: 40

Here's a wierd one. Did anyone in this group ever notice that
log-in times get insanely long sometimes on FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 ?

It only happens with tcsh or csh, not sh or ksh. Sourcing the
.cshrc and .login files takes only a few seconds, so it's
not anything in them.

I have tried to do a 'ps' from another virtual terminal while
the machine is "thinking" and don't see anything at all
unusual.

It has *some* relation to system load, I think, but I haven't been
able to see that absolutely. I think it may occur when a lot of
processes are running, but they may be in a blocked state waiting
on tty input. This seemed to be the case at least twice when the
problem occured.

Rebooting fixes the problem for a while.

It has taken as long as 40 seconds sometimes to get logged in.
It also can take a long time to 'su' from a user to root (if root
is running csh or tcsh).
Oh, yes, it also takes a long time to 'logout' or even 'exit' from
an 'su' back to user level. After the log in, the system is
fully responsive, not sluggish at all...

This is a '386-25 with 8 megs and a 340 meg IDE.
I have a '386-40 with 4 megs at work and it never exhibits this
phenominum, even when unbatching lots of news.

One more thing, I'm *not* running the nameserver stuff..

Any ideas?

PS.. I never received any replies to an earlier query concerning
drq time-outs on the IDE drive. Still get them occasionally. Any
comments on this would be appreciated.

-Jim Durham