Re: Are there any GNOME specific performance tools?

[Adam Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

>> 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. 

Actually I felt quite the opposite; 2.0 was blazingly faster than 1.4, and 
each version has been faster yet.

>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')

If you've got crappy 2d video acceleration moving to a "bland" theme does 
help ALOT.  I did this on my old amdK6 box and the improvement was 
staggering.

>> 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 :-)

For kicks, can you disable anti-alaising and see what happens? (You can 
always turn it back on).