My netbook is going super slow, so I was trying to go to a virtual terminal to see if I could kill firefox or something else that could be clogging it up. I made it to tty2 and successfully entered root at the login prompt, but when I hit enter, I never got a password prompt. It just sat there forever and then said:Login timed out after 60 seconds.Is there any reason this password prompt was slow as molasses (while the username prompt was fast enough to make it in time)? What can I do to make the tty sessions always available to me when I need to clean up stray processes?
Why is the password prompt so much slower than the login prompt?
login
There are two basic reasons for that behavior:Processing:  There is a huge computational difference between outputting a single line of text for the login prompt, and starting the secure password input and processing.Security:  It's also a matter of security.In order to prevent an attacker from skillfully trying to determine the password length based on the time it takes for the validation (it's been done), it is common practice to add a random delay to the operation.Throttling the password verification also has the benefit of reducing the number of attempts a system can do on a certain time period.  For example, if the password check takes 5 times more than it could, the attacker will need 5 times more time to crack it.Your problem occurs because your system is very overloaded and unable to properly balance the resources needed, which causes basic tasks to timeout.When you do find the offending program, you should figure out a way to prevent this type of freeze, maybe by limiting its memory usage, processing priority and the such.