[csw-users] cups very slow

[Markus Mayer]

On Tuesday, 16 Jan 2007 15:26 +0100, Christoph Litauer wrote:

> But any action on cupsd [...] is veeery slow. Long timeouts. I tried
> to truss cupsd, but it doesn't let me ... No messages in error_log
> ...
> 
> Any ideas?


This problem has in fact been tracked down to be caused by
libgcrypt.so. libgcrypt's 'configure' script assumes that Solaris
doesn't have /dev/urandom, so it always uses /dev/random.

CUPS, in turn, uses  libgcrypt.so so set up encrypted connections.
Therefore, CUPS was always using /dev/random as well.

So, whenever there wasn't enough entropy in the pool to satify the read
from /dev/random, the call would block till the entropy pool had been
re-filled, leading to the 'CUPS is so freaking slow' behavior you and
others have described.

Torrey, the maintainer for libgcrypt, was so kind to build a new
packages within half an hour of me telling him what the problem was.
These packages are currently available from
http://www.blastwave.org/testing/libgcrypt-1.2.3,REV=2007.01.21-SunOS5.8-i386-CSW.pkg.gz
http://www.blastwave.org/testing/libgcrypt-1.2.3,REV=2007.01.21-SunOS5.8-sparc-CSW.pkg.gz

Installing the new libcrypt package from testing should make the
slow-CUPS symptoms go away.

Within a few days the packages should be available in unstable.

Regards,
-Markus