Slow firefox startup on x86_64

[Sylvain Rouillard]

Hi,

First off, I have to mention that firefox works fine, it starts, it runs, it 
closes. All fine. Just I found it a little slow to fire up, so I ran some 
investigation. Until I issued this command:

$ strace -e trace=open firefox

I will not post the whole log here, although I have it ready and can provide 
it on request. This small quote gives a good idea of what the whole log looks 
like:

open("/usr/lib64/firefox-1.0.3/tls/x86_64/libplds4.so", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT 
(No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/firefox-1.0.3/tls/libplds4.so", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No 
such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/firefox-1.0.3/x86_64/libplds4.so", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No 
such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/firefox-1.0.3/libplds4.so", O_RDONLY) = 3

Basically, firefox looks in 3 or more places for each lib until it finally 
finds it. This is probably at least part of the "slow" (just a few secondes, 
really, but it's still noticeably slow) startup of firefox. 

I have to mention that I installed firefox along with FC4T2 and updated it 
through yum update. Although I'm not an expert, I would risk a guess and say 
that the rpm that was used is in cause here. I tried to compile from source 
to see if the same result could be observed, but it fails to compile. So, I 
couldn't tell if it's really the RPM that does that, or firefox itself.

Am I the only one to see this? Is my interpretation of facts erroneous?

Cheers,

Sylvain