Raspberry Pi Waveshare TFT Trouble

In order to monitor a small Raspberry Pi 3 running as a server I bought a Waveshare 3.5" TFT touchscreen which connects through the GPIO pins.

I followed the instructions that came with it and all went well. It booted in to X and I could use the touchscreen without any further configuration. I don't need X as I'm likely just to run htop most of the time. This is where the problems started.

The Pi would show the boot process on the TFT then suddenly stop. After waiting a while I hit some keys and the screen moved, but didn't change. Seems the boot process was finished but I couldn't see it.

I tried everything I could think of. It wasn't until I hit ctrl-alt-f2 and saw a login prompt that things started to click. After much Googling I found myself looking at the /etc/rc.local file which contained the following conspicuous line:

fbcp &

It turns out this command copies the framebuffer with a small delay (~25ms). I remmed out this line, rebooted and all was well.

I suspect if I wanted to load X I might need this line back, but for now I'm happy.