5-10 second delay when launching Terminal.app in OSX
A couple of days ago my Terminal.app (console) got a really annoying feature. When launching the console or when I created a new tab it got stuck for about 5-10 seconds before I got my prompt.
If you are like me and are spending most of your time in Terminal.app you understand how annoying this is/was.
I tried to rename .profile, .inputrc and evey other startup script I had in my home folder but the problem did not go away.
Then I found an OSX user which had his Terminal crash when started. He solved his problem by cleaning up some OSX systemlogs. So I thought I try the same trick.
The logfiles which he removed where the asl files under /private/var/log/asl/
I read about them here: http://macosx.com/tech-support/can-i-deleteasl-log/24223.html
But I figured I’d just remove them all 
[cc lang=bash]
sudo rm -rf /private/var/log/asl/*
[/cc]
When all asl files where removed my Terminal went back to normal again and I am sooooooo relieved.
This worked for me BUT I do not recommend you to remove anything if you do not know what you are doing!!!
Cheers!
I just wanted to add that this worked for me as well; I had maybe a 5s tops delay, and after this it has dropped to below a second; still not as fast as on my Macbook Pro, but good enough.
Thanks Mathias!
Brian Bibeault
on February 3rd, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Thanks for sharing Brian!
/mathias
Mathias Stjernström
on February 4th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
I just want to put out that this actually fixed a few of the delay problems I was having throughout the system.
Doug
on July 12th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Thanks Doug!
/mathias
Mathias Stjernström
on July 12th, 2010 at 7:24 pm