On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 05:22:56AM -0800, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> Starting a login shell on my system takes a painfully long time, mostly
> because fork() is pretty slow on WOW6432 systems. I've taken a look at
> the shell initialization routines and identified some potential savings:
>
> - Can't we use USERNAME to set USER instead of running `id -un`?
>
> - Move the /tmp chmod to the user-home-directory-doesn't-exist-case, or
> better yet, get rid of it altogether and move /tmp permission setting to
> install scripts
>
> - Detect the current shell by examining BASH_VERSION, ZSH_VERSION, and
> so on, not by forking for the echo|tr|sed pipeline.
>
> - Use this code to run the profile.d scripts:
> saved_LC_COLLATE=$LC_COLLATE
> LC_COLLATE=C
> for file in /etc/profile.d/*.{sh,zsh}; do
> LC_COLLATE=$saved_LC_COLLATE
> test -a "$file" && . "$file"
> done
> unset saved_LC_COLLATE
>
> - The default /etc/profile exports PS1. Please don't do that: it causes
> weird issues with Emacs tramp; it causes other shells that interpret PS1
> differently (like zsh) to do odd things; and it uses up precious
> environment-block space. Better to set PS1 in bashrc.
>
> - There's a useless uname -s invocation: since Cygwin doesn't run on
> Windows 9x anymore (and good riddance!), the first branch of the
> conditional is always taken. (Saves two forks.)
>
> - Replace the invocation of regtool with a direct read from
> /proc/registry. That is, instead of
>
> # Three forks
> PRINTER="`regtool -q get '\user\Software\Microsoft\Windows
> NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\Device' | sed 's/,.*$//'`"
>
> use
>
> # Zero forks
> read -r PRINTER <
> '/proc/registry/HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows
> NT/CurrentVersion/Windows/Device'
> export PRINTER=${PRINTER%%,*}
>
>
>
> I've modified my own /etc/profile. It ends up being an order of
> magnitude faster than the stock version:
>
> dan...@xyzzy ~
> $ time . /etc/defaults/etc/profile
>
> real 0m1.012s
> user 0m0.075s
> sys 0m0.318s
>
> dan...@xyzzy ~
> $ time . /etc/profile
>
> real 0m0.104s
> user 0m0.015s
> sys 0m0.015s
I'm already working in some changes in base-files to include some
bugfixes, and hopefully improve start-up performance by reorganizing how
things are done now. I'll check your proposals.
One thing: we need to set at least a minimum PS1 in /etc/profile,
because every shell (except tcsh and zsh) fallback to that setting in
case there are no ~/.${SHELL}rc and friends. And also because not
everybody uses bash (even though it is the default one) :)
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