Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

enbQao · 2022-12-18 21:36:09

Hi there,

I have a really weird issue that kind of freaks me out a bit.

Today, I have installed four packages from the AUR.
After installing them, I noticed my laptop fans would spin up constantly, which they usually NEVER do.
Of course, my mind immediately went to "probably overlooked some fishy stuff in the PKGBUILD files and now there is some malicious stuff running on my system, great".
So I looked through the PKGBUILD files again very carefully, but I could not find anything suspicious. I uninstalled all of them and just let it be, thinking I am probably just a little too paranoid.

Now that the day is finished, I turned of my device. And for some reason, this seemed really "slow" compared to how fast it usually is.
I have not modiefied anything during the boot or shutdown sequence, so I can see the usual output.
Normally, this goes by so quickly that I cant read a single thing. But now, it goes by noticably slower. Slow enough so I can follow it.
The same thing is happening during boot. Usually its so quick I can't read a thing but now it just goes by quite a bit slower so I can follow what is happening.
Coincidentally/luckily, I took a video of boot and shutdown sequence a few weeks ago to share this (usually insanely fast) behaviour with someone else.
I compared the video with the current behaviour and it is really clear that now, it is quite a bit slower, so I am not just imagining it.

I have NO CLUE what could be the reason for this. Since something as early as the boot sequence is affected, I do not think it is related to malicious software (but I mentioned it since I am not 100% it is not).

Does anyone maybe have an idea?

P.S. I am not sure if this is the correct section to ask this question but I thought it could be hardware or kernel related (maybe something that I have overlooked), so I put it here

Last edited by enbQao (2022-12-18 21:38:04)

jonno2002 · 2022-12-18 21:52:37

what 4 packages did you install ? this obviously caused the problem so we cant help unless we know what they are

enbQao · 2022-12-18 21:56:14

jonno2002 wrote:

what 4 packages did you install ? this obviously caused the problem so we cant help unless we know what they are

I have installed (electronmail, whatsie, whatsdesk and whatsapp-nativefier).
But just so there is no confusion, I quickly uninstalled them again.

Last edited by enbQao (2022-12-19 08:52:01)

jonno2002 · 2022-12-18 22:17:44

ok nothing obvious there, can you post your pacman log and journal from before you installed those packages up untill now ?

cfr · 2022-12-18 22:42:58

Your whatsie link is broken, by the way. You can edit your post to correct it.

For the slowness, post the journal for a boot which displays the issue. Use --no-pager so the lines don't get truncated.

Is it slow if you boot to multi-user.target rather than graphical.target? If the issue appears there, maybe post the journal of a boot to multi-user.target as it will reduce the size and simplify things a bit. See first link in my signature if you aren't sure how to send the journal to an appropriate pastebin from the command line.

[You can also try using things such as systemd-analyze or systemd-blame, but their output can be rather misleading so be cautious of interpreting the results.]

Last edited by cfr (2022-12-18 22:47:45)

enbQao · 2022-12-19 09:20:16

cfr wrote:

Your whatsie link is broken, by the way. You can edit your post to correct it.

Fixed it, thanks for the hint!

cfr wrote:

For the slowness, post the journal for a boot which displays the issue. Use --no-pager so the lines don't get truncated.

jonno2002 wrote:

ok nothing obvious there, can you post your pacman log and journal from before you installed those packages up untill now ?

Before I give that a try (since it probably takes a while to look through all the lines there), I noticed something else:
My device has an NVMe drive (Samsung Evo 970 Plus 512G). I have another laptop that has a regular SSD. There, the boot is much slower. So I had the idea that the boot might be related to issues with my NVMe drive.
So I checked the current sequential read speed with

$ hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1

and got about 1800 MB/s, when it should be around double that, 3500 MB/s. Coincidentally, given the video recording I mentioned, boot and shutdown are slowed down by the same factor of around 2 (not a precise measurement, but its roughly twice as fast). Write speeds seem to be fine, checking with dd, I get write speeds of 3300 MB/s which is right around the advertised sequential write speads.

Could this be related to the issue somehow? If so, how would I go about figuring out why the NVMe drive is so "slow" all of a sudden?

If you think this is not related in any way, I will get the journal output for the boot and dig through that.

cfr wrote:

Is it slow if you boot to multi-user.target rather than graphical.target? If the issue appears there, maybe post the journal of a boot to multi-user.target as it will reduce the size and simplify things a bit.

I do not use a display manager, I boot staight into the tty. This should be multi-user.target, right?

cfr wrote:

See first link in my signature if you aren't sure how to send the journal to an appropriate pastebin from the command line.

Thank you for that information! I did not know about that, pretty neat. Will use this from here on out for all pastebins.

Last edited by enbQao (2022-12-19 10:17:30)

enbQao · 2023-02-11 10:37:02

Just wanted to give a quick update on this:
I tried a couple different things and I am pretty sure it is not related to the aforementioned packages.

Since I figured out that the part that takes longer is the (un)mounting of all the volumes, I ended up replacing my NVMe drive and did a fresh Arch install, but after all, I still notice the exact same "problem".
This leads my to believe it is probably related to some changes in the Kernel or systemd. I dug through the changelogs of the last few versions to see if there is anything that could be related, but I did not really find anything. Since I do not want to spend any more time investigating this, I just wanted to state these findings here.

The problem is not solved, but at least it is not related to some random packages.

Last edited by enbQao (2023-02-11 10:37:44)

seth · 2023-02-11 15:31:20

Please post your complete system journal for and affected boot:

sudo journalctl -b -1 | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st # for the previous boot

enbQao · 2023-04-15 13:57:45

seth wrote:

Please post your complete system journal for and affected boot:
sudo journalctl -b -1 | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st # for the previous boot

Thank you for trying to help!
Unfortunately, there is too much "private" information throughout this log which is why I would not want to post it online somewhere.
As an alternative, could you maybe tell me what you would be looking for specifically? I could then look into the logs myself and try to see if I can find anything suspicious.
I have already looked at the timestamps to see if there is are any "jumps" (i.e. indicating a step the process would be stuck in), but everything looks normal (no big jumps) there.

seth · 2023-04-15 14:16:41

There's no private information supposed to be in the journal. If there's something embarrassing, feel free to transparently obfuscate it (ie. w/ obvious and unique pseudonyms), the BSSIDs and UUIDs you see are generally not of privacy concern.

The problem is completely unspecified ("it's slow™") so my plan was to check the journals for suspicious stuff™ and go from there.

Arch Linux

#1 2022-12-18 21:36:09

Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#2 2022-12-18 21:52:37

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#3 2022-12-18 21:56:14

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#4 2022-12-18 22:17:44

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#5 2022-12-18 22:42:58

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#6 2022-12-19 09:20:16

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#7 2023-02-11 10:37:02

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#8 2023-02-11 15:31:20

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#9 2023-04-15 13:57:45

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

#10 2023-04-15 14:16:41

Re: Boot and shutdown suddenly slow

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