Re: [Bug-XBoard] Re: Extremely slow startup

[h.g. muller]

At 22:33 3-8-2010 -0400, Adrian Petrescu wrote:
> Here is a strange symptom that may illuminate the issue or make it more 
> puzzling. You decide which.

This will indeed be a tough cookie...

For me, startup of XBoard under Ubuntu is fast, so I cannot test it myself.

It sounds like XBoard is making a system request that your system has big 
trouble in satisfying.
What are you seeing durng these 10 seconds? Is the XBoard main window 
already up, and
is the Chess board properly displayed? Are any of the auxiliary windows 
already up?
The most passive mode to bring XBoard up in is -ncp (with -ics you might 
still hang because
of connection problems with the ICS), so perhaps you should always test on 
that.

Could you start XBoard with the -debug option? This should make a file 
xboard.debug,
and if we are lucky, we can establish from that where it hangs. I think it 
does print some
progress reports during the startup process, from main() in xboard.c. If 
not, we should
add some fprintf(stderr, "..."); there to figure out where it hangs. There 
are no time stamps
with debug messages from XBoard itself, though. So to see where it hangs, 
it might be
necessary to kill it during those 10 sec.