A weird thing has happened to my "man" command, typing man causes man to load, but incredibly slow. As in, it first displays a new blank line, then clears the screen, then stays blank for a few minutes, finally showing up the requested information.
At first I thought it was just hanging up, so I kept Ctrl-C'ing it for a few days, then decided to fix the problem and waited for it to do something.
Once a man page has showed up, further calls to the same page are normal. Newly requested man pages do the same thing.
Googling this up just shows marketing crap / ads.
Some sort of corrupted cache being rebuilt on-demand?
Anyone has noticed similar behaviour on man?
The rebuild on-demand (on a very busy system) seems like a likely explanation. If it's easily reproducible, then I would do this in the window where you are going to execute man:
tty
In another window execute this script:
while [ 1 ]; do
clear
date
ps -ft ttyvalfromotherwindow
sleep 5
done
In yet another window, do this:
top
Together you'll probably figure out what is going on.