Hang on startup

[Ben Boeckel]

Hi,

I've been experiencing this for a while and I'd like to get to the
bottom of it. When starting `mutt`, sometimes it hangs for a long time
before drawing the UI (input is appropriately buffered though). Is there
some network call done on startup or other I/O (`strace` shows that it
is in the middle of a `poll` call when it is hanging) that might be
timing out? Currently using 1.10.1, but I've been seeing it for a while
now, so it isn't new behavior.

Thanks,

--Ben

[Jostein Berntsen]

Post by Ben Boeckel
Hi,
I've been experiencing this for a while and I'd like to get to the
bottom of it. When starting `mutt`, sometimes it hangs for a long time
before drawing the UI (input is appropriately buffered though). Is there
some network call done on startup or other I/O (`strace` shows that it
is in the middle of a `poll` call when it is hanging) that might be
timing out? Currently using 1.10.1, but I've been seeing it for a while
now, so it isn't new behavior.

Can you start mutt with "mutt -d 2" and see if you get more information
then?

Check first that your mutt is compiled with DEBUG though:

mutt -v | grep DEBUG


Jostein

[Kevin J. McCarthy]

Post by Ben Boeckel
I've been experiencing this for a while and I'd like to get to the
bottom of it. When starting `mutt`, sometimes it hangs for a long time
before drawing the UI (input is appropriately buffered though). Is there
some network call done on startup or other I/O (`strace` shows that it
is in the middle of a `poll` call when it is hanging) that might be
timing out? Currently using 1.10.1, but I've been seeing it for a while
now, so it isn't new behavior.

Mutt performs a DNS lookup using gethostname() and getaddrinfo() to try
to find out the host's FQDN. If you are hanging, it could be this is
not configured correctly.

Adding a line to /etc/hosts with a FQDN may help:
127.0.1.1 rotor.yourdomain rotor

See also https://muttmua.gitlab.io/mutt/manual-dev.html#hostname
although setting that does not change the startup behavior because the
muttrc is processed afterwards.

[Ben Boeckel]

Post by Kevin J. McCarthy
Mutt performs a DNS lookup using gethostname() and getaddrinfo() to try
to find out the host's FQDN. If you are hanging, it could be this is
not configured correctly.
127.0.1.1 rotor.yourdomain rotor
See also https://muttmua.gitlab.io/mutt/manual-dev.html#hostname
although setting that does not change the startup behavior because the
muttrc is processed afterwards.

Indeed, watching strace for longer shows that (I was always impatient
before):

recvfrom(5, "\366\310\201\202\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\5rotor\0\0\1\0\1", 2048, 0, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.1.96")}, [28->16]) = 23
poll([{fd=5, events=POLLIN}], 1, 4996) = 0 (Timeout)

I remember now that we have been having DNS hiccups here and that would
seem to be another symptom of that problem. Thanks for the workaround.
I'll ping our sysadmins again :) .

--Ben