Dell precision M50 and _very_ slow process startup

After _quite_ a bit more investigation, and some good pointers from the net (thanks, all!), this has turned out _not_ to be a problem with swapping/paging at all.

For some reason, the magicdev process slows the system to a crawl!

I'm guessing that this process watches for cd insertion, changes to home directory, et. al.

There seems to be no man page or info for magicdev itself.

Does anyone know more about this beast?

I've solved the problem temporarily by simply renameing /usr/bin/magicdev...

Something like that. I think it's part of GNOME and is responsible for making sure there's a CD icon on the screen, or something.

We had a different problem with this beast after installing RH6 some time ago. Every few seconds it would cause a spew of messages to the syslog reporting basically what we knew: there is no CD in the drive. It turned out though that these messages went away when the CD was properly reconfigured as a CD-writer by appending "hdc=ide-scsi" to the boot parameters. Not that this is at all relevant...

Anyway, no I don't know much about it.

imc

Yes, that is what it does (CDs and hotplug storage only, actually).

It's part of GNOME, you might see it mentioned in 8.0 in the splash screen as you log in. It's been known to cause many kinds of trouble :-)

You can disable this from the GUI in 8.0, but renaming the binary is just as effective. The only feature you lose will be automount on CD insertion.

Andrew