You are right, you don't need to run it all the time, only when something with new libraries have been installed.

But I get where cwwilson is coming from. I would feel better setting something up where I know it will be run, because I would worry that I would forget about it.

But if you are confident in your memory, you can do it manually when it is actually needed.

As for the issue of speeds, it does seem like your Slackware install needs some optimizations. My install of current blows the doors off of Ubuntu, or pretty much any other distro I have run.

Yeah, I can understand the forgetting thing. For me it's just a habit to run it after installing or upgrading, but I suppose it could happen. LOL I usually do a "make install && ldconfig" out of habit.

I agree that Slack runs faster than any other distro I've used on my machines with the possible exceptions of Arch and Gentoo which seemed about the same to me.

The way my luck goes, if I don't, I'll need to. So I just put it in the shutdown script, where I don't really care how long it takes to turn off.

Another thing you could do is add a '&' to the end of the lines in rc.M that call those two routines. That way, it runs them in the background, while continuing the rest of the boot process.

Well all I have to say is that on my slack box every program is operational within 10 seconds or less ( firefox, open office, the gimp, digicam, etc ... )

and when disabling hotlpug ldconfig and fc-cache even boot up ist prettys fast with my box,

perhaps is your startup times are delayd by hardware issues ??

You could do that, but I have the suspicion (this is purely my own speculation though) that the reason Pat didn't background ldconfig is because daemons started from rc.M after the ldconfig line could depend on libraries that ldconfig needs to update (for example, if you rebooted after a system update).

So if say, you background ldconfig, and before it finishes, Samba tries to start up and can't load up it's depenencies, it is going to fail to start.

It seems that if you are going to move it anywhere, the shutdown scripts are the better idea. That way you know that if the libraries were working when the system booted, even if you make any library changes, ldconfig is going to take care of them when you reboot/shutdown to prevent any problems at the next startup.

In fact, now that I think about the actual mechanics of it, I might even do that on my own system.

That's why I do it that way. The '&' route is 99% safe, tho, but putting it in rc.6 makes sure it runs (and since I only reboot when I need to update the system...)

Btw. installpkg from pkgtools runs ldconfig after a package extraction so it's not necessary to run it manually.

What if you don't use istallpkg or pkgtools? It's a minor point, but I do always run ldconfig in rc.6. That way, I can't forget.

If you rely on tools and memory, eventually, they'll let you down...

Hm, so it does. I never noticed that before.

this is an old thread, but what's the code to move these startup tasks to the background? do you just stick after the existing command in the startup script? i'd really like to background ldconfig and hotplug, since those two by themselves add 30 seconds or so to boot time.

A single & is what you want. Using && does the opposite of what you want. Backgrounding hotplug may not work for you though, depending on your hardware, unless you explicitly load needed kernel modules elsewhere. Usually, it's the network configuration being called by hotplug which takes so long.

Here's the way I speed up boot time in Slackware (can be up to 2x as fast):

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...09#post2672909

Also, use fluxbox ... KDE is way bloated and slow ... much slower than even GNOME.

ldconfig has been moved up in the init scripts and backgrounded with & in Slackware -current. It makes the boot times considerably faster, and is a safe enough approach so that there are no problems.