Slow GUI

[Leonid Podolny]

Hi,
My problem is so basic that I even fail to figure out what to
debug/benchmark/google, etc.
My computer feels amazingly sluggish in everything that is UI-related.
For instance, it takes some 10 seconds for Firefox to fire up (counting
from the click on the icon). Same with Konsole -- 5 seconds. Firefox
window maximization -- 3 seconds until the actual window maximizes, and
some more seconds until all the menus/panels are redrawn. The time from
clicking on a checkbox in a webpage till the "V" sign appears is also
noticeable. It happens with both Qt and GTK applications.
The machine is more than strong enough for GUI tasks -- it's T7300 with
3Gb RAM with i965 graphics. The CPU level is around single percents. The
software is Gentoo Linux, KDE 4.2.3.
Fedora 10 on the other box I have feels MUCH more responsive. The only
difference I can think of is that it has nVidia graphics card.
hdparm shows 50 MB/sec (a bit lowish, but doesn't explain
orders-of-magnitude slowness I exprience).
md5sum of zero-filled file of 1 Gb takes 8 seconds (the second time, so
that it will be read from the cache).
I can't think of other tests.