bug#24628: GNUtls initialization adds 500ms to startup --- do we really need it just for the RNG?

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:

> On my system, I noticed that the call to emacs_gnutls_global_init is
> adding 500ms to the time it takes to run emacs -Q -nw --batch --eval
> '(kill-emacs)'. We're not actually using GNUtls for anything but an
> RNG seed, and /dev/urandom is also up to the task.
>
> I'm not sure what's making GNUtls so slow, except that it's talking to
> a process called credkit-service, which is using a lot of CPU time. It
> shouldn't matter though.
>
> Can we go back to just using /dev/urandom directly?

[larsi@stories ~]$ time emacs -Q -nw --batch --eval '(kill-emacs)'

real    0m0.021s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m0.004s

My Emacs (from master) doesn't spend 500ms talking to anything, and it's
built with gnutls support, so the interesting question here is why your
gnutls library is so slow.

You didn't report the bug with `M-x report-emacs-bug', so no information
about your system is available.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no