Arghh!

There is nothing worse than a problem that goes away once you restart the program. Case in point: ls -l /home ran atrociously slow (slowly?) on a Solaris 10 machine at work today. It's running Sun's DS 5.2 (or whatever they're calling it these days).

I've come across this problem before when I was trying to figure out how to get the thing to bind to itself by default as an LDAP client, rather than to one of the remote servers that're meant to be backups.

This time, though, that simply wasn't the problem: no traffic was going to the other machines at all. All I saw was looooooooooong lookup times for simple passwd stuff. Error logs showed nothing. Access logs swore blind that access times were on the order of zero nanoseconds. Truss showed it kept mmap() ing things; dtrace showed a whole lotta reads. I couldn't figure out more than that (which, natch, is my fault, not the tools).

In the end and out of desperation I restarted the server…which did the trick but left me frustrated that I'm no closer to figuring out what's going on with the damn thing.