Rhythmbox slow startup when running awesomewm after boot

[pianocomposer321]

I’m running Manjaro xfce edition, and I have installed awesomewm and am running it alongside the xfce desktop (using my own config not the majaro awesomewm one).

If I start an xfce session, rhythmbox’s startup is almost instant. If I reboot and do the same in awesomewm, it takes ~30 seconds to start. This is only the case for the first launch - all subsequent launches are nearly instant, just like in xfce.

I have tried using the default awesome config, as well as tried my best to see what processes rhythmbox needs running in the background to start that may be causing the initial hang. No luck.

This is any especially annoying problem because each time I want to test a theory for what might be causing the problem, I have to reboot.

Any help would be appreciated!

[kerry_s]

so you ran rhythmbox from terminal & it gave no output?

if i remember right it’s a gnome app so you need to:
systemctl --user import-environment
to your awesomewm startup.

it might also be the gnome-settings-daemon, sorry i’m old memory’s not that great.

[pianocomposer321]

It does give some output. A warning and a message or two. But IIRC it’s the same messages whether it takes a long time to start or not, and also the same on xfce as in awesome. I can check on this later.

I will also check on the things you suggested. I think it is because it’s a gnome app, because there are some other applications that seem to do the same thing, but it’s not consistent, so it’s really hard to pin down for sure. Anyway, I’ll test these things later and get back with you.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[pianocomposer321]

I believe I solved it!

By running htop and sorting by pid, I noticed that whenever I start rhythmbox, it seems to hang after Thunar --daemon process starts. So I decided to do some testing. I put Thunar --daemon in my autostart, and sure enough, if I wait a while after login (until that process starts fully), rhythmbox then starts immediately. So that was the place where it was hanging.

So I decided to try removing thunar and seeing if that fixes it. However, I then learned the pain of trying to use xfce utilities on a non-xfce system - thunar wasn’t going to be removed without a fight. So I though, whatever, I’ll just remove all of xfce - I don’t use it anyway: sudo pacman -Rd --nodeps xfce4 xfce4-goodies, and, wallah, rhythmbox now starts quickly again!

So I don’t know exactly what the problem was, I just know that it was something to do with either thunar or xfce in general. Anyway, it’s fixed now!