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Ever since I upgraded to Mavericks, the Terminal prompt became a bit slower at coming back. It's not a huge deal, but there's now a slight noticeable delay before the prompt comes back (maybe like a quarter of a second) which gets annoying over time.

How would I debug this issue? Basically, is there a way to see what exactly it's doing in that time? What are common causes of such a slow down?

houbysoft
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    Are you using bash, zsh? you can try cleaning out the .asl logs sudo rm /private/var/log/asl/*.asl – l'L'l Nov 17 '13 at 00:50
  • @l'L'l: I'm using bash. Just did that, but it doesn't seem like it changed the speed much. – houbysoft Nov 17 '13 at 00:59
  • the next thing you could try is /bin/zsh -i -x which should tell you what is running prior to the prompt showing. Also, make sure you quit and re-launch terminal after clearing the logs :) – l'L'l Nov 17 '13 at 01:03
  • @l'L'l: yeah I did restart the terminal. Also isn't that for zsh? I'm using bash – houbysoft Nov 17 '13 at 01:08
  • you're using zsh in that instance as a debugger (of sorts). – l'L'l Nov 17 '13 at 01:19
  • @l'L'l: hmm, just ran it and it showed me that it's just running /usr/libexec/path_helper and setting the PATH. Is there a way to see what gets run "between" prompts? The problem is not really slow startup, just that it takes a while to come back (i.e. I open Terminal, then hit enter, and it takes a while to show me another line) – houbysoft Nov 17 '13 at 01:28
  • let us continue this discussion in chat – l'L'l Nov 17 '13 at 01:33
  • For info on debugging it, see all answers here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/41743/how-do-i-speed-up-new-terminal-tab-loading-time – rogerdpack Feb 19 '15 at 20:39

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I was encountering a 5-second lag (!) between Terminal window creation and receiving a bash prompt. (This was on a fresh install of Mavericks on which I had copied user profiles from another machine.) I removed all the *.asl files in /private/var/log/asl/ as mentioned here, and it completely solved my lag issue. Thanks.

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