Speeding Up UNIX Login by Caching the Initial Environment
Carl Hauser
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Abstract
A package scheme helps users manage the environment variables needed
by the applications that they use, but imposes a long delay during
login while the environment is incrementally constructed. This paper
describes an approach to caching the incrementally constructed
environment. The mechanism caches different environments for
different operating systems and is robust in the face of users'
changes to their .login files. For the typical PARC user who enables
11 packages at login, caching reduces the time to login from about 30
seconds to about 5 seconds.
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