It's certainly not "normal", many more people would have been
complaining by now if it was!
Back when I was running OpenACS 4.x on Solaris, I used to see
AOLserver startup take a quite a long time due to very slow XML
parsing of the xql files. But even that was only 1 or 2 minutes worst
case, and when we moved the site to Linux (and much faster Intel
hardware) everything sped up immensely.
Does the pause in the AOLserver startup happen consistently every time
at the same place in the AOLserver log? Or was it a one time only or
variable thing?
Note that the 16:48:00 line is probably the first line logged
after whatever was blocking things went away. (You would
have to confirm that by looking at exactly when the ns_log statements
happen in the code though.) So the thing to do is look at the log
lines immediately before and after the gap, and figure out what was
going on during the gap. Presumably, whatever AOLserver was trying to
do during that gap is what's responsible for the god-awful 5 minute
slowdown.
The users-selection package is in contrib, so probably not many people
use it and perhaps it is at fault.
