[slime-devel] Re: long delay starting up slime on a computer off-line

[Luke Gorrie]

Chisheng Huang <cph at chi-square-works.com> writes:

> When my computer is connected to the internet, M-x slime will get me 
> a slime repl buffer immediately.  However, if my computer is not 
> connected to the internet, it takes much longer to get a slime repl 
> buffer.  There is a long wait while the mini buffer displaying 
> "Connecting to Swank on port 35948...", after which there is another 
> long wait while the mini buffer displaying "initial handshake...".  
> The first delay is due to a call to OPEN-NETWORK-STREAM in 
> SLIME-NET-CONNECT.  Not sure about the 2nd delay, which is probably 
> on the CL side.  Is it possible to get rid of this long delay when
> starting up Slime on a computer off-line?

Sounds suspiciously like a DNS lookup. We actually make two network
connections (one for the RPC channel and then one for streaming user
output) so that would explain your delays.

What platform are you running on?

Off hand the only thing I can think of that could explain this is if
you're on a GNU box and your /etc/nsswitch.conf says to check 'dns'
before 'files' (i.e. goes to the network before checking /etc/hosts).

I wonder if we should be saying "127.0.0.1" instead of localhost?

We should also write a note about the security impliciations of the
swank protocol, and note which backends at least manage to bind our
listen-sockets on the loopback interface.

-Luke