slow startup

[Przemek Klosowski]

I have also seen slow startup on my system, but I suspect it's not
octave's fault because I have seen occasional mysterious slowdowns in
things like 'ls'. I have a Fedora 4 64-bit patched, and 64-bit octave
2.9.8. It doesn't always hang but when it does, it's typically like this:

    stat(".", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|S_ISVTX|0777, st_size=52572160, ...}) = 0
    stat(".", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|S_ISVTX|0777, st_size=52572160, ...}) = 0
    open(".", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY) = 3
    fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFDIR|S_ISVTX|0777, st_size=52572160, ...}) = 0
    fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)           = 0
    getdents64(3,                            <-------- up to minute-long waits

I suspect Levente has also a 64-bit system (he said he uses 5GB memory).
Maybe it's a syscall performance problem. Levente, what kernel do you
use (send output from uname -a)