On 05/02/2013 02:47 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 01:15:58PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>> On 05/02/2013 12:58 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 12:33:37PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>>>> On 05/02/2013 12:27 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>>>>> Hi, Gentoo.
> 
>>>>> I've just built libreoffice-3.6.6.2 and it took 2 hours 10
>>>>> minutes on my 2.6 GHz quad core Athlon 2.  It used to take about
>>>>> an hour.
> 
>>>>> Watching the build, it became evident that the first 50 minutes
>>>>> or so was taken up by several hundred mkdir operations (more
>>>>> precisely, mkdir -p <long path>).  Some of these mkdir's would
>>>>> take, perhaps, a minute to execute.  All the while, top showed
>>>>> make taking 100% of one core.
> 
>>>>> There seems to be something suboptimal here.  Has anybody else
>>>>> seen this, or does anybody have any ideas how to fix the
>>>>> problem?
> 
>>>> Long delays suggest a timeout of some sort.
> 
>>> OK.  As a matter of interest, some of the mkdirs executed relatively 
>>> quickly - perhaps in 0.5 seconds.  I never saw the screen whizzing by
>>> as I ought to have done, though.
> 
>> Hm.
> 
> 
>>>> First thing I'd look at is the filesystem underneath, and the disk 
>>>> underneath that.
> 
>>> My /var is an ext3 LVM partition, doubled up on a RAID-1 disk array.
> 
>> How full is the ext3 partition? What options do you have enabled on it?
>> (e.g. dir indexing?)
> 
> root@acm ~ # df /var
> Filesystem         1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/vg-var  12385456 1959860   9796580  17% /var
> 
>>> In the middle of the mkdiring, I checked there were enough inodes
>>> free (there were).  I've no reason to suspect the disk drives might
>>> be flaky.
> 
>> Well, you kinda do, now;
> 
> The reason I say this is that building the last ?one/two/three versions
> of libreoffice also gave me this grief, but I haven't noticed anything
> else amiss.
> 
>> you have evidence that at least some disk access is unusually slow.
>> Check dmesg for disk I/O errors (unlikely to be reported at this point;
> 
> Nothing awry in dmesg.
> 
>> I'm sure you checked whether your RAID was in a degraded state),
> 
> cat /proc/mdstat shows everything in order.
> 
>> and run commanded smartctl tests on the disks.
> 
> That I haven't done, yet.
> 
>>>> Second thing I'd look at is to see if permissions checks might be 
>>>> bouncing through something like kerberos, samba or ldap. Do you
>>>> have any single-signon things configured on that machine?
> 
>>> I've not got kerberos or samba installed.  I appear to have ldap 
>>> (whatever that might be ;-).  ls -lurt /usr/bin/ldap* shows these 
>>> binaries were last accessed (?used) on 2012-03-14.
> 
>> It would be more a question of whether they were tied into PAM.
> 
> OK.  I'm sadly ignorant about PAM.  :-(

If you've just got a single box, it's very unlikely this is your problem.

> 
>>> What exactly do you mean by "single-signon"?
> 
>> Well, that was a slip of the tongue. More "central auth". I was
>> wondering if there were any features installed on your system that are
>> designed to check authorization against a server somewhere. (i.e. you
>> can use an LDAP directory to centrally manage things like users, groups,
>> etc.)
> 
> Not that I know of.  My machine is a mere desktop connected via a
> router/modem to the net.  I'd have no reason to install any auth stuff.
> 
>> Technically, single-signon combines authorization checks with persistent
>> authentication checks. Examples of this include kerberos, web session
>> cookies and some uses of OAuth; once you're authenticated, the mechanism
>> ensures you don't need to authenticate to another server in the same
>> auth realm so long as your existing session hasn't expired. But this is
>> less likely to be related to your problem than something seeking to ask
>> a server if you have authorization to access something.
> 
> If this were the case, what would libreoffice's build need to ask that no
> other package stumbles over?
> 

My presumption there was that this was a very recent thing, and LO's
time-to-build makes it easier to observe.

Anyway, floor's open to anyone else who might have an idea.