[erlang-questions] Erlang occasionally hangs at startup

[Tuncer Ayaz]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 8:37 PM, Loic Hoguin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I see occasional hangs when starting the Erlang VM ("erl",
> regardless of options). It seems to occur only on some networks
> (seen it happen in a few hotels and seeing it in the appartment I
> rent here now; though it didn't happen a few weeks ago in the same
> place). I never see it at home though.
>
> This is with 17.3.4, though I have seen it with 17.1 and also with
> versions before 17.

Is it correct to assume that you're mentioning the locations with
regards to the local wired/wireless network?

If so, have you tried different ~/.erl_inetrc settings?

> The hang is just before Erlang starts printing things in the shell.
>
> "strace erl" prints a lot of things until:
>
>   write(6, "\0", 1)                       = 1
>   select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL
>
> Then it hangs, then it prints the shell stuff:
>
>   Erlang/OTP 17 [erts-6.2.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4]
> [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
>
>   Eshell V6.2.1  (abort with ^G)
>   1>
>
> According to the manual this select call waits until it receives a
> signal. Not sure what the signal it expects is or if it even hangs
> *there* though. My strace skills are pretty weak, especially with
> threaded programs, so I'm most likely missing something.
>
> Note that I can Ctrl+C and get the menu just fine while it hangs.
> Not Ctrl+G though (as expected, since the shell isn't started yet).
>
> Has anyone seen this before or knows how I can investigate this
> issue further?

If tracing the release VM does not reveal anything informative, then
I'd suggest to try a debug build, but that might of course hide the
issue, though my gut feeling is that your problem is not of that
sort.