8.1.5 ‘configure’ is slow

On a few systems, ./configure has been observed to take an extremely long time to run. A common source of the problem is a slow filesystem. During the course of its execution the configure script creates and compiles a large number of small files. If the current directory resides in a filesystem that exhibits poor small-file performance, then this may explain why ./configure runs slowly. Try to configure coNCePTuaL from a local filesystem (e.g., /tmp) and see if it runs faster.

A second source of poor coNCePTuaL configuration speed regards poor implementations of the Bourne shell. One test system, a 1.9GHz PowerPC running the original—not GNU— Bourne shell under AIX, took several hours to run ./configure to completion. Fortunately, the system adminstrator had installed the GNU Bourne Again shell ( bash ), which does not exhibit the same poor performance as the default Bourne shell. ./configure can be instructed to use bash —or any Bourne-compatible shell—by setting the CONFIG_SHELL environment variable:

env CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash ./configure

The preceding command reduced configuration time from over two hours to under two minutes.