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    Slow shell open in OSX Lion

    Av

    Do you find that opening a new tab in Terminal, or iTerm takes a long time? Maybe 5 to 10 seconds, instead of being nearly instant?

    If so, you may want to take a look at Apple’s syslog replacement called ASL.

    ASL stores its logs on OSX Lion, under /var/log/asl/.
    When Terminal or iTerm open, by default the execute:

    login -fp <username>

    This (for whatever reason) seems to read all of the log files under that directory. If like me you have 300Mb of rotated log files in there since your last reboot, opening a new shell can take quite a while.

    I don’t know what the impact of deleting the files is, but given that they’re log files I deleted the rotated ones anyway. So far, so good! Shells open quickly again!

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    Comments

    5 responses to “Slow shell open in OSX Lion”

    1. nosli Avatar
      nosli

      Thanks a lot, this was killing me. I had some AppleScrips for starting iTerm and open some tabs with webserver/db/test etc. and they failed just because iTerm was so slow starting a new session. Works like a charm again, so thank you!

      Reply
      1. Av Avatar
        Av

        You’re welcome!

        Reply
    2. David Avatar
      David

      Perhaps a more permanent way is this (obtained from http://superuser.com/questions/31403/how-can-i-speed-up-terminal-app-or-iterm-on-mac-osx)

      For Terminal: Preferences → Startup: Change from “Default login shell” to “Command: /bin/bash -l”

      For iTerm2: Preperences → General → Command: Change from “Login Shell” to “Command: /bin/bash -l”

      Reply
      1. Mateja Avatar
        Mateja

        Thanks, works like a charm!

        Reply
    3. JeffH Avatar
      JeffH

      It’s a while later – but the behavior continues.
      In order to find the place to put the change in iTerm2 look in:
      Preferences -> Profiles -> Command : Change from “Login Shell” to “Command: /bin/bash -l”

      Reply

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