Re: Gnome is very slow

[Chris Rouch <crouch pobox com>]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 10:35:37 -0600
"Hoyt Bailey" <hoyt13 wiredok com> wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Hoyt Bailey" <hoyt13 wiredok com>
> To: "gnome-list" <gnome-list gnome org>
> Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2004 16:34
> Subject: Gnome is very slow
> 
> 
> > I have posted a simular problem before and while the problem seemed
> > to go away, I later went into nautilus and attempted to configure
> > the system, within nautilus the problem was still present.  However
> > the desktop was working otherwise.  The problem was and is 30 second
> > and longer delays
> from
> > clicking on an item untill it executes or even responds.
> > I am back because I finally found mcc and configured things there, 
> > no network or servers were touched.  I did switch window managers
> > from metrocity(sp) to gdm.  At the time it didnt seem to switch
> > because it complained about another manager running, on subsequent
> > login however gdm was running and everything had 30sec or longer
> > delays.  This makes gnome unusable.
> > I dont know where the problem is but I suspect it may be in X. But
> > KDE dosent exibit any such behaviour so that should mean that X is
> > ok.
> >
> *********UPDATE*******
> Apparantly it isnt a network problem,  because I can ping localhost
> and get satasfactory response 0 errors @0.26 to 0.29ms and hostname
> returns localhost.  Another suggestion was made earlier to try strace.
>  Well I tried
> and I dont know how to involke strace 'strace -Tcf /tmp/strace.o'
> wasnt adequate niether was 'strace -Tcfo /tmp/strace'.  Therefore if
> you would like to see the output I need a workable command.  The man
> page indicates that the output can be limited,  this might be a good
> idea but 2 minutes is a long time @ 1.7Ghz.
>

I don't think strace is going to help, but here are some things you can
try:

1) ssh localhost uptime

This will either prompt you for a password or complain that it can't
connect to a sshd. In either case, the response should be very quick -
if it takes 30 seconds or so the the problem is with the network.

2) df
If this hangs then you have nfs/automounter problems. If it finishes
quickly then you don't. Check that none of your partitions are close
to 100% full

3) uptime
Make sure that the 3 load average numbers are all less than 1. If
they're not, wait 5 minutes and do it again. If they're still too big
then you probably have some rogue processes.

4) look at .gnomerc-errors and .xsession-errors. Maybe there is somthing
nasty showing up there.

5) look at the output of top. Are there processes hogging the cpu? Are
you nearly out of memory or swap space?

Finally, is it just nautilus that is slow or does the whole system seem
sluggish? I haven't used nautilus for a long time, but one of the
reasons I stopped was because it was too slow. This was several versions
ago though (gnome 2.0 I think).

HTH,

Chris
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Rouch
crouch pobox com