Re: Is it just me, or is E (and gnome) SLOW!

[James Green <gnome cyberstorm demon co uk>]

In message <19990410193140.A12575@win.tue.nl>, Ronald de Man
<deman@win.tue.nl> writes
>On Sat, Apr 10, 1999 at 12:12:02PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:

[ display speed ]

>> Doesn't seem slow here on a P233. There are two special cases of slowness
>> recently noted: 1) if apps hang on startup they are fooling with esound 
>> 2) if you have an 8-bit display Imlib can take a long time to dither
>> pixmaps. Both of these are being fixed.

I experienced something rather less than pleasant myself regarding
speed:

When gnome boots up (with latest everything inc. E), everything runs
pretty well. Transparent (shaded) E-Terms are a bugger to deal with but
they eventually kick in. Using Absolute E together with the Gradient GTK
theme things are pretty fast. But not as quick as NT4.

Friday night I had a long session in Gnome (Gnome-libs-1.0.6 at the
time), with Gimp 1.1.3 crashing left right a center so I gave up and
instead went to bed with Netscape (latest) silently on
http://news.bbc.co.uk (the java applet keeps the modem alive even though
there aren't any timeouts set). And so I left it with only this and an
E-Term running for the night.

When I got to it several hours later absolutely everything has slowed to
a crawl. Moving any window involved waiting for even for the pointer to
catch up. Opening the default gnome foot menu took ~5secs every time, as
did opening the gmc RMB menu. It seemed that everything had been moved
into swapspace while I was asleep. Even continued opening of menus to
bring them back into normal RAM didn't work, the hard disk just kept of
thrashing about.

At first I thought it might be something crashed overnight and using up
all the resources. Alas I didn't at the time know how to discover mem
and swapfile usage and so couldn't check. But I did kill off a couple of
unknown processes and it didn't help at all. Only after I killed
Netscape and E-Term did things get back up to speed. However, knwoing
that I could have at least 3 E-Terms plus netscape up previous to this
without any speed degradation I went ahead and loaded a new e-term. This
work fine. I loaded another. Again fine. Another and suddenly everything
went back to a crawl. I closed an e-term, and everything was fine again.
I concluded anything more than 2 E-Terms at a time would trash my
memory. Some while later I disconnected (early Sunday morning) and quit
X to recompile gnome-libs patched to 1.0.8. I again left it running
overnight, this time compiling. I got back and entered X and everything
was fine again.

I don't understand had could have caused it.

>Maybe it depends on the definition of slowness. But in my experience
>moving around windows in E is very sluggish. That's on a P233 as well.
>On equivalent computers running Windows 95, moving around windows is
>much smoother. For a while I thought it must be X. But a few weeks ago
>I was helping out a friend on a P75 running fvwm2 (stock RH 4.2)
>and it was incredibly smooth.

Well, I'm running a K6-2 300, 64Mb RAM, 3.2Gb IDE HD (with 128Mb swap-
file), Matrox Millenium II 8Mb @ 1024 24bit colour. My motherboard has
won awards for it's socket-seven speed too (+1Mb cache). WindowsNT4 is
bloody quick, X (latest but not the recent security update) is OK
normally.

>I'm using icewm at the moment. It's quite a bit faster than E, but
>still more sluggish than fvwm2 on a P75.

I don't think gnome is to blame for everything speed wise. I tried using
News-Puruser (latest) and it was so slow I couldn't believe it.

>I must add that these are just my impressions, and not scientific
>observations.

Ditto.

>> The other way to make it really slow is to use a complicated pixmap
>> theme; those unavoidably use a lot of RAM and some amount of CPU, so if
>> your computer runs out of RAM and starts chewing into swap it is going to
>> get really slow. If you want all the really crazy E/Gnome desktops you
>> have to buy RAM. Try the default theme and see if it's better.

>Using default themes with 128 MB.

I'd be very interested to know the hardware and experiences of those
doing themes at e.themes.org in comparison.

-- 
James Green