Re: Gnome very slow

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 06:43:02AM -0600 or thereabouts, Hoyt Bailey wrote:

[Reformatted a little to get rid of the extra quote marks from the
forward]

> > > I am having difficulties with gnom.  There is excessive
> > > delay between clicking on an item and any response.  This
> > > delay is from 30 sec to 1 minute.  I am running Mankrake
> > > 9.2 on a athlon 2100+ XP w/512M mem running @ 1.7G on a
> > > gigabyte KT400 mobo. The kernel is 2.4.22.   

I think the clue is in here, and I nearly posted, but Malcolm asked
the question I was going to.

> > > This is unacceptable. KDE runs at a much faster rate and top, 
> > > on the gnome desktop, with nothing going on cycles from 1 
> > > to 3 processess running, approx 88 sleeping. I don't have
> > > a clue.  Since this isnt normal I came to the experts.
> >
> > Obviously this is not normal, but you have not really
> > provided enough information that I can think of anything
> > obvious to suggest.
> >
> > When say "clicking on an item", what do you mean? Are you
> > selecting a menu item or something on the desktop or ...?
> >
> Previously I dont remember using the menu a lot, due to the
> speed,  so I guess I was mostly clicking on icons & applets
> on the desktop and panel.

> > So you have 'top' running in a terminal and you say that
> > one to three processes are running actively -- which
> > processes are they? Are they using a lot of CPU?
>
> No.  A 386 could have handeled what the cpu was doing.
> Monitor applett showed a spike occasinally not very high
> (about 1/8").  the only time the cpu showed activity was
> during installation of a program + an occassional burst to
> 1/2 in high and decaying for no more than 1/4 in in time.
> The only processes I saw on top yesterday were X, top &
> terminal. Today with normal cpu activity on the monitor 
> there was rpmv, top, X & ternimal, rpmv stopped showing up 
> while I was watching.

> > time to time)? Is the machine connected to a network? If
> > so, can it do DNS lookups (the period of inactivity could
> > be related to DNS timeouts in some circumstances)?
> >

> Previous to today it was always there today things are
> 'normal'.  No network as far as I know no DNS.
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This may be the crux. 

A consistent 30s delay between clicking a menu item and
the application starting sounds like something trying to
establish a connection and timing out to me.

I am not clear on the details, but Gnome does like to 
know when it's on a network. It used to be the case that
if you had messed up settings, Gnome would try to read
something (nameserver?) as it started up and then tell you 
it couldn't identify something (hostname?) and did you
want to continue to log in? 

If you did, you would get 30s delays on every new Gnome
app starting up, from the editor to gnome-terminal.

If you have a machine which is absolutely not connected to a 
network (laptop, for example), it's fine. If you have a machine
which is correctly connected to a network, it's fine. If Gnome 
gets the idea that it is on a network but can't contact the 
(hmm --what? something, anyway!) to find out where on the 
network it is, it gets very upset. 

You can find out whether it's doing something like this
with strace, perhaps. This will generate _tons_ of output
so don't post it all to the list!

> > Are you just using the standard GNOME packages that came
> > with the Mandrake installation?
> >
> Yes GNOME 2.4.

I don't know enough about Mandrake to know how to do this,
but if you could somehow not only disconnect the box from
a network but convince the machine that it is disconnected
(comment out everything in resolv.conf etc), and this goes
away, I would focus on this as the problem.