1

First of all, I'm sorry if it seems like this question has been asked a million times before, I tried to make the title hint at the fact that my schools filesystem is different from anything I've used before, and the usual results that you will find on google don't work for me.

Let me start off by saying that my school just upgraded their computers from El Capitan to High Sierra, and before the update, all it took to speed up the terminal was a simple one liner to delete the logs:

find ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports -mindepth 1 -delete

However, this solution no longer seems to speed up my terminal, and it's getting progressively slower on startup, as well as having a bit of lag when using ls and other simple shell commands... I have gone to the IT staff at the school about this, but unfortunately they have bigger issues right now than a slow terminal and they said they would get around to it when they have time.

Thing is, I don't know how long that's going to be, so I would like to see if I can solve this without their help. After a bunch of google searches, all I was able to turn up was stuff that either didn't help (disabling certain features to speed it up), to delete log files that don't exist on this machine, or to delete logfiles in an area that requires a sudo password which I don't have.

Is there any way I can locate the source of the slowdown? If I can at least find the source, I can bring my findings to the IT staff and they will happily help me out if the solution requires sudo... but for the time being they are too overworked to investigate the issue.

Our school uses iMacs running High Sierra, on an NFS filesystem. I'm pretty sure the computers are virtual machines as well.

Thanks.

|improve this question
  • 1
    What do you mean by „slow terminal“? Is the typing slow, or the response when you run commands? How does NFS come into play here, is it slow also for operations on the local drive? What does Activitiy Monitor show? Is there something special in your .bashrc? Where is your home directory, local or on NFS? – nohillside♦ Jan 19 '18 at 5:42
  • The startup is slow, and there seems to be a bit of delay when using commands such as cd or ls .... but to be honest, that delay is tolerable, it's the slow startup that's frustrating me. I'm not sure the activity monitor will show anything because it's slow in the startup, but not so much after that. i can still check if you'd like, when I go back to the lab. My home folder is on NFS. – Elliot Tregoning Jan 20 '18 at 0:07
  • It could be something in Terminal itself (install iTerm2 to compare), in .bashrc (then opening a new tab would be slow as well) or with NFS (then it‘s hard to fix). – nohillside♦ Jan 20 '18 at 7:20

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .