Bug#765784: systemd: Very slow boot time (4 Minutes).

[Uoti Urpala]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:23:54 +1100 Marc Bonnor <mabo1 at iprimus.com.au> wrote:
> The command ls -l /tmp also blocks ...

That pretty much confirms that it is a filesystem problem not directly
related to systemd.

> The line before the lines shown in the file extract has an odd looking
> path "//tmp", do you think this may be problem ?

No, that works the same as "/tmp".

> The "st_size=117604352" looks very large, is this normal, does it
> represent free disk space?

st_size means the disk space used for the directory data. That is a very
large amount. Most likely you've had a huge number of files in /tmp at
some point, and the directory keeps a large size even after the files
have been deleted. Whether this behavior of making later access very
slow should be considered a bug is a question better asked from
kernel/filesystem maintainers.

You can probably work around the problem by deleting the directory
(preferably when the system is not fully up and using the contents) and
creating or letting tmpfiles (after reboot) create a new one.