A minute for a manpage
Why would it take one minute for man tr
to show me the manpage?
I’m running macOS 14.7. Sure, my laptop is 5 years old.
Still, it should not literally take 60 seconds to show a manpage.
And yes, this was only the first invocation.
The second time was instant.
Theory 1
Manpages are stored in a gigantic encrypted compressed file
and the macOS man
command effectively has to decrypt
and decompress the entire thing just to show one manpage.
Theory 2
The manpages are downloaded over the Internet from Apple’s manpage server?
Theory 3
The manpages had to be indexed by something slow before being readable.
Theory 4
Some other 3rd party software got in the way.
Theory 5
The effective MANPATH
included some slow network filesystem.
Conclusion
I don’t know what this was, but it was slow.