Re: gitk (or tcl/tk) slow to start?

> On May 17, Michael J Gruber wrote:
>> Eli Barzilay venit, vidit, dixit 17.05.2010 12:58:
>>> Every time I run gitk when I didn't use it for a while, it takes a
>>> long time to start (more than 30 seconds) with no visible cpu load.  I
>>> tried to strace it, and the result shows that the time is spent
>>> stat()ing my whole /usr/lib directory:
>>>
>>>   ...
>>>   stat("/usr/lib/libelf-0.131.so", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=87496, ...}) = 0
>>>   stat("/usr/lib/libungif.so.4", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=2444, ...}) = 0
>>>   stat("/usr/lib/libtiff.so.3.8.2", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=360268, ...}) = 0
>>>   ...
>>>
>>> Is this expected?  Anything that can be done to avoid it?
>>
>> I don't expect stat'ing /usr/lib to take 30s. How large is it (file
>> size and count)?
> 
> I've done some more counting -- the most number of system calls (as
> tracked by strace) are 2968 reads, 4582 lstats, and 6520 stats.  And
> it looks like it's recursively scanning /lib, /usr/lib, and /usr/share
> for all *.tcl files.  stracing `wish' shows 11000 l/stats -- so I
> guess that the problem is there and not in gitk.  Trying wish on a
> fedora 12 machine, I see only ~350 {,f,l}stat64 calls, and gitk starts
> as fast as I'd expect it to.
> 
> Oh well, I was hoping that someone knows some bit that needs flipping
> or updating to get it to work faster -- I guess it's one more reason
> to finally upgrade the F7 machine...
>