Slow GUI

[shimi]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Leonid Podolny <leonidp.lists at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
>

If you go to System Settings -> Desktop - do you have "Enable desktop
effects" checked? If so, try to remove it.

Try a generic video driver like vesa

Does your user have permissions to write to the /dev/dri/card0 character
device?

Is the CPU level at single percents when you actually *do* something?
Looking on it at idle does not count :) If not, what process occupies most
CPU?

-- Shimi
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