"why is my Linux so damn slow?"

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:51:25 +0100
"M. Fioretti" <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> when I upgraded from Fedora 12 to Fedora 14, about twenty days ago,
> the system (which wasn't doing really well even before the upgrade)
> became almost unusable. The problem is, very likely, upstream of
> Fedora, but I would like to understand where exactly is and if/how
> Fedora in some way amplifies it. I've posted all details here:

Sounds to me like your X setup

"Probably, a good part of the problem is in some weird X/nVidia/kernel
interaction, or lack thereof, but can it really justify this behavior?
Opening and closing windows and tabs, typing text… this is stuff that
even with a suboptimal or misconfigured driver should be instantaneous.
No?"

The answer if your X is all messed up may well be not, although if you
set your X server to use the VESA driver with shadowfb you might get a
better idea, as there I would expect it to be acceptable (but not great)
regardless of card.

There are lots of other things it could be, unfortunately you've not
provided any really useful information on the machine, you've not
provided any dumps of stuff that would be useful, not even running top,
or mentioning whether it is better after a reboot and so on, no dmesg
data, no X logs nothing.

So start with a reality check. You have a complex system that is
misbehaving, to debug it sanely you need to do it step by step and you
need to actually know little details like which X server is being run,
whether it is the same one you were running in FC12 and so on.

On an 8GB box with Intel onboard video even Gnome is usable so something
is definitely wrong in your specific setup

Alan