Rob Phillips wrote:
Over the last few days, it has been taking terminal a minute or more to respond to each command I type. Any ideas what causes this? Is it a 10.4.3 thing?
Does it respond normally as you type, and only have a delay before executing the command and displaying a result?
Now, here's a bit of a barrage of questions and things to try. Please reply with the results; it should help indicate what might be wrong or at least narrow it down a bit.
Is there a delay if you run the command " : " (just type a colon, and hit enter) ? That command says "do nothing", but it's a shell builtin - it doesn't involve creating another program like most commands do. The same thing with a separate program is "/bin/true" - is there a delay when you run that one? What about "id" ? What's the output of the command "time id" ? What does the "hostname" command say (er... I think Mac OS X has a "hostname" command; if not, try "uname -n" instead) and is there a delay when you run it?
A delay of a minute or so could easily be a timeout, probably a network timeout. Are you using NetInfo for distributed settings and user management? What about an Active Directory (Windows) Domain, NIS, or LDAP?
I'm assuming that you've already checked to make sure the system isn't otherwise busy, and that it's only the terminal (or, at least, POSIX applications) that're slow.
If you're feeling brave, you could try using a tool like truss or strace to watch what a program is doing, and see if you can tell why it pauses. If you like I can explain how to do that, but please try the tests I suggested above first.
-- Craig Ringer
