[OTR-dev] Freeze, .NET, RPC, and other weirdness

[Ian Goldberg]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 03:27:55PM -0800, chris.tuchs at hushmail.com wrote:
> Users of OTR in Emerald recently started complaining about a freeze 
> when they get the first OTR message.  I did a little investigating 
> and found that a bunch of strange DLL's get loaded and RPC calls 
> get made.  Are you aware of any reason that calling 
> otrl_message_receiving() would cause any of the following to be 
> loaded, or RPC calls made (and failed)?  I include the first half 
> of the log, I didn't bother to include the unloading of all those 
> DLL's or 3 separate threads that stop running.
> 
> 'secondlife-bin.exe': Loaded 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\netfxperf.dll', 
> No symbols loaded.
> 'secondlife-bin.exe': Loaded 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\mscoree.dll', No 
> symbols loaded.
> 'secondlife-bin.exe': Loaded 
> 'C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\PerfCounter.dll', No 
> symbols loaded.

I bet this happens when OTR needs to generate random numbers.  The first
time libgcrypt needs random numbers, it does a bunch of system-level
stuff to try to gather as much unpredictable state as it can.

If you want to do it at startup, you should be able to just call
libgcrypt's random number generator, I think.

   - Ian