Erlang on OS X

[Dave McMahon]

On Friday, Aug 22, 2003, at 08:53 Europe/Dublin, Kostis Sagonas wrote:

> Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
>
>>> When I run the Wings3D loader it hands off to beam, which then takes
>>> about 30 minutes to actually display anything on screen. I downloaded
>>> the precompiled version of Erlang/OTP and found that when I run erl
>>> from the terminal, it's a similar story. It seems to work, 
>>> eventually.
>>
>> This is a wild guess, but I had a similar problem on Windows. The 
>> problem
>> was that I had added a lot of entries in the .hosts file and at 
>> startup,
>> loading the file took a long time. Not 30 minutes, but like 5-6.
>
> I experienced a similar problem on my old laptop running Linux 
> Mandrake.
> For some weird reason, the /etc/hosts file was filling with 2999 
> entries
> once in a while, and starting beam took quite a while.  Deleting those
> entries, fixed the problem.
>
> Kostis.
>
>

Well, your wild guess was right on the money. Some time ago while I was 
still using dialup I installed an etc/hosts file that pointed a lot of 
spam/advertising sites to 127.0.0.1 and sped up my web access by a 
large amount. The file was about half a megabyte in size, and this was 
indeed the cause of my problems with Erlang/OTP. Now I've gone back to 
an etc/hosts file that is about half a kilobyte things are running 
perfectly.

However, one thing does rather confuse me. From the README file that 
comes with the source for Erlang/OTP:

> Erlang/OTP will read the network configuration files in "/etc" at
> startup.  In Darwin these are normally not used by the operating
> system. The easiest way to force Erlang/OTP avoid reading the files
> is to put the line (including the ending '.')
>
>   {lookup,["native"]}.

Doing this didn't seem to have any effect on the problem whatsoever. 
It's irrelevant in my case because I no longer use the large etc/hosts 
file anyhow, but I would have thought it would have circumvented the 
problem.

Many thanks for your help.

Dave McMahon