strace shows you the system calls being made by the program. When it's hanging for a long time, note the last few lines of output from strace and let us know what those are. The last one will be the call that is taking so long to finish.

On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 11:56:00AM -0400, Robert Levy wrote:

Hello,

Apologies for cross-posting (this list and martinos-tech), but I think that by posting here I might be able to reach a few more people who may have had the problem before and solved it.

I have been experiencing very long load-up times, when running tksurfer. It can take up to 6 or 7 minutes to load. As far as I can tell, the application does not have any unusual or slow behaviors once it finally launches. The problem was not present until Friday, but has persisted since, and I run it the same now as I did before.

Paul Raines mentioned on martinos-tech that there used to be a problem where the SUBJECTS_DIR was searched recursively and it would slow down the loading times for a comparable length of time. Can anyone confirm that this is still what tksurfer does? When I run it, I source the latest development version.

If the problem is not the long search and file checks, then what could be the source of the delay?

The command is: tksurfer average7 lh inflated The output is normal and I'm running it from /space/ventzl/1/users/SUBJECTS_DIR/ This is the tksurfer /usr/local/freesurfer/dev/bin/tksurfer

The initial output is: surfer: current subjects dir: /space/ventzl/1/users/SUBJECTS_DIR surfer: not in "scripts" dir ==> using cwd for session root surfer: session root data dir ($session) set to: surfer: /autofs/space/ventzl_001/users/SUBJECTS_DIR

Then it hangs for 6 minutes or longer, and launches the tk gui.

When I strace it, there is trace information to show initially, and then there is the text output I mentioned above, but during the waiting period there is no output from strace at all.

Thanks in advance, Rob