On Wed, 2023-01-18 at 20:48 -0500, Joshua Kinard wrote: > So this article[1] from 2017 popped up again on the tech radar via > hackernews[2] and a few other sites[3]. It > annotates how if the envvar TZ is undefined on a Linux system, it causes > glibc to generate a number of > additional syscalls, mainly stat-related calls (in my tests, newfstatat()). > If defined to an actual value, > such as ":/etc/localtime" (or even an empty string), glibc will instead > generate far fewer, if any at all, of > these stat-related syscalls. > > [...] > So is adding a default definition of TZ to our base system /etc/profile > something we want to look at? I > haven't tried any other methods of benchmarking to see if not making those > additional syscalls is just placebo > or if there are actual impacts. Given how long this oddity has been around, > I can't tell if it's a genuine > bug in glibc, an unoptimized corner case, or just a big nothingburger. >
Am I correct that there's no real difference between setting it to ":/etc/localtime" and the actual timezone? I suppose it would make sense to default it. -- Best regards, Michał Górny
