Re: CVS Emacs on Windows XP takes 60 seconds to start

[Francis Litterio <flitterio@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Francis Litterio <flitterio@gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:16:55 -0400
>> 
>> Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
>> 
>> > Francis Litterio wrote:
>> >> CVS Emacs built and running on Windows XP seems to perform some network
>> >> operations that cause a ~60 second pause after the initial window is
>> >> drawn and before the Welcome screen appears.
>> 
>> > Thanks. Is this when you start with default emacs?
>> >
>> >   emacs -Q
>> 
>> Sorry for omitting that.  It happens when I run both "emacs -q" and
>> "emacs -Q".
>
> Is this the first time you built the CVS code?  If not, when was the
> last time you built it (and I presume saw no such slowdown)?

This has happened with every successful CVS build since my mysterious
build problems disappeared about week ago.  I didn't have time until now
to investigate further.

I have additional information.  My machine has a firewall that blocks
all outbound TCP and UDP traffic _except_ to trusted ports on trusted
hosts (kind of a "whitelist" firewall).  I relaxed my firewall to allow
outbound TCP connections to ports in the range 1025-1035 (the ones most
commonly used by RPC) on any host, and the pause was immediately reduced
to less than 5 seconds (which could be attributed to my domain
controller's slow response time).

As well, after a successful startup in this configuration, the local
cache of information obtained from the domain controller seems to live
for several minutes, because I don't see any RPC traffic to ports
1025-1035 on my domain controller until I start Emacs again after
several minutes.

I think my firewall was causing the ~60 second timeout in RPC calls to
the domain controller.

I would summarize the problem like this: Starting CVS Emacs on a Windows
machine attached to a domain when a firewall prevents RPC communication
with the domain controller, caused a ~60 second pause during startup.

The strange thing is that no other application or Windows functionality
was negatively affected by my firewall rules that blocked outbound TCP
connections to ports in the 1025-1035 range on my domain controllers.
Perhaps Windows uses the SMB ports to communicate with a domain
controller if it can't make an RPC call?
--
Fran