X performance woes

[Paul Kaplan]

I use KDE rather than Gnome, and since things seem to straighten out in xfce, 
this might help.  I've previously encountered performance problems when 
upgrading versions and have usually traced them to the window manager config 
directory.  The legacy directory will contain junk which slows things down.  
Can you backup all your Gnome config directories and then let it rebuild when 
you login again.
Paul
On Saturday 18 April 2009 16:34:34 Hal Burgiss wrote:
> After upgrading to 8.10 I am still having awful X performance issues.
> The worst is of course in Firefox, but I have very similar problems if
> I switch to Opera, so its not just Firefox. And its not just my system
> since most of this is just since the upgrade. Can anyone explain why
> simply *typing* in a browser text field can consistently spike the CPU
> to 100%. Its close to unusuable. I am reluctant to scroll pages, as I
> will enter the land of "watching paint dry" while the load triggered
> case fan sounds like its in a nascar race.
>
> Noothing happening now, normal process list:
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  8887 halb      20   0  381m 226m  24m S  3.8 22.6  10:36.79 firefox
> 13548 root      20   0  423m  62m 7320 S  3.8  6.2 663:33.21 Xorg
>  4311 halb      20   0  133m  23m  13m S  1.9  2.3   0:52.76 konsole
> 13760 halb      39  19 32816 5760 2496 S  1.9  0.6 133:05.88 trackerd
>     1 root      20   0  3056  560  504 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.62 init
>     2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
>     3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
>     4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   3:29.32 ksoftirqd/0
>
> Now, a minute later while typing in a text field (twitter.com):
>
>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> 13548 root      20   0  423m  62m 7320 R 51.1  6.2 663:34.85 Xorg
>  8887 halb      20   0  381m 226m  24m R 47.1 22.6  10:38.51 firefox
> 13760 halb      39  19 32816 5760 2496 S  2.0  0.6 133:06.46 trackerd
>     1 root      20   0  3056  560  504 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.62 init
>     2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
>     3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
>     4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   3:29.32 ksoftirqd/0
>     5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
>
> That load is from the *keyboard*. Madness! It stays like that until
> after I stop typing. I have disabled addons, changed config settings,
> etc, but it does not help significantly. Opera is just as bad so I
> don't think its just Firefox bloat. Epiphany if anything is worse. I
> switched from gnome to xfce and that helped greatly with some
> performance issues, but something is still right royally fubared.
>
> --
> Hal