I noticed lately that nvidia-settings takes a LONG time to start up. It takes over a minute before it will start. I decided to see what it was doing via strace, and was surprised to find it trying to make a connection and timing out. Here is what I found:
nvidia-settings uses libX11 to connect to two X servers: the display connection specified in $DISPLAY, and the control connection specified by -c on the command line (defaults to $DISPLAY if unset). If libX11 is compiled with TCP support (which it usually is) and the display connection has the form “host:port” or “host:port.display” then it will try to make a TCP connection to that host.
[Edit] Oh, and I forgot to mention that there’s currently a bug that causes it to write the hostname for some of the attributes in ~/.nvidia-settings-rc, namely the color correction settings. If your hostname is set wrong, that might be causing part of the problem. Check ~/.nvidia-settings-rc to see if it has attributes with hostnames that resolve to that address.
I can confirm that nvidia-settings takes enormous time to start (approximately 1 minute or so).
This bug was introduced in 304.64 driver. My nvidia-settings is not connecting to any IP in NY or whatsoever, btw.
PS: i was very pleased with nVidia’s attention to GNU/Linux, but considering total mayhem introduced since 304.64 drivers (maybe in 304.60 too, i just skipped it) i’m considering AMD as a viable alternative for my future computer.
By mayhem i mean blank tty’s (no signal), nvidia-settings not starting properly, corrupted X-session upon starting (blank screen, 1 blinking pixel at left top display’s corner (happens in 1 case out of 10, but still… - never happened before), impossibility to compile kernel module without 3rd party patches for nVidia’s driver (this is absolutely ridiculous and is a serious risk for system’s security) - this happened with 304.64. I don’t know guys what happened to you, but i am very disappointed.