Re: Are there any GNOME specific performance tools?

[Chris Rouch <crouch pobox com>]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 07:15:46 -0500 (EST)
"Larry W. Virden" <lvirden cas org> wrote:

> I am wondering whether there are any tools specifically designed to
> assist in investigating performance problems related to parts of
> GNOME?

I only know of the standard ones - top etc.

> We're attempting to move users from an OpenWindows olvwm environment
> to a Sun GNOME metacity environment.  One of the consistent complaints
> is how slow the desktop is.

I think, unfortunately, that's just the way it is. gnome 2.4 seems to be
designed to look pretty rather than be fast. I'm hoping this will be
addressed in 2.6. While the performance is good on my desktop (AMD
2800+, 1Gb ram, so it should be!), it was unacceptable on my laptop
(750MHz pentium II, 256Mb ram), so I ended up switching back to fvwm for
my desktop and just using the gnome clients. 

In a linux enviroment prelink makes things faster, and I've heard good
things about the 2.6.x kernel, but of course that won't help you in a
Sun environment.

You could try picking a 'fast' theme - one that minimises eye candy and
thus the cpu cycles needed to redraw the screen when you change
desktops. You could also try getting rid of any applets that you can't
live without. You could try changing metacity to sawfish (I don't know
if it's any faster, but IMO it's more 'non-newbie-friendly')
> 
> Even after setting the them down to something like Esco, the time
> it takes to move from one workspace to another for instance is a
> constant source of complaint.

Are these newish sun boxes with a sun supplied gnome on them? Then
complain bitterly to your supplier. If not (and this probably won't help
you much), I remember building gnome 1.x (the release just before 2.0)
under solaris 2.6 from the tarballs. This was ~4 years ago on whatever
the midrange workstation was then. From what I remember it took forever
to build, but once installed it was every bit as fast as CDE. But that
was before it was made user friendly :-)


Regards,

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