High latency when starting Xfce
 

I have an issue with Xfce and the time it takes to spawn the programs that were executing in my saved session.

Whenever I start Xfce, the window manager will proceed to restore my saved session, but this can take 10 seconds, sometimes 15 or more. This would have been fine if I had a slow computer, and these were demanding programs to start, but they are not, and the computer is fast.

The programs in question are a series of rxvt terminals, 7 of them, and my computer is a 4.12 GHz Core i7, 6 GiB of RAM and a Crucial CT64M225 SSD. During this latency period, there is no activity whatsoever that I can observe, the CPU usage is flat, i.e. 0% from my CPU graph module, there is no memory use fluctuations that I can see, there is no HDD activity.
It seems that the system is simply waiting for some task to complete, but I don't know what.

How can I eliminate this issue? Is this a problem that anyone else have?

I have this issue on two physical computers, one of them is a laptop, the other is a desktop, both have fast SSDs and are in general fast computers.

I use Slackware 13.1.0 on both computers, I use custom highly optimized kernels, but have the same issue with the standard kernel.

Slackware 13.1 X64 here
 

Hi,

I close everything before I shutdown.

But the Slack 13.1 X64 XFCE tips dialog acts like you said, high latency, way more than 20 seconds

startxfce4

I do that and then the desktop comes up extremely quickly.

3.33 GHZ Intel dual core, sata II HD, 8 GB ram, radeon HD 5450 pci-E

Once the desktop is nearly immediately up it all then sits there (like way way too long) before said tips dialog arrives on scene.

It acts like it waits for more than 20 seconds before it launches the tips dialig because the dialog springs into view quickly.

--
Alan.

Did you check the md5sum of the slackware 13.1.0 disk maybe thats your error. Something might be corrupt.

When stuff like that happens with XFCE, it's usually crap in /home/yourname/.cache/session that's causing it. Log off XFCE and delete the contents of that directory. startxfce4 and open your desired programs again. Log off and see if the new saved session loads correctly.

Thanks for the tip, but deleting the contents of my ~/.cache directory yielded no observable effect at all. There is still the high latency associated with starting.

That is simply too unlikely that I will consider it a possibility for the time being, I will have to become truly desperate before I resort to such matters.

The pause is most likely from console kit or polkit. What happens when you disable that and start it without it? Also may try starting the terminals in the .xinitrd file and see if that speeds up the start time. I don't have a solution but maybe some of those ideas will lead to a solution or work around.

Delays of the order you describe could be caused by network timeouts. It might be worth packet sniffing in case there are any clues in the network traffic.