X server in F14 horribly slow

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 03/29/2011 10:43 PM, JD wrote:
> On 03/29/2011 06:28 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
>> On 03/29/2011 05:08 PM, JD wrote:
>>> Can this be attributed to Gnome or to the X server
>>> or to the ATI Radeon driver?
>> I'm using F 14 and Gnome and see no problems even though my mobo's maxed
>> out at 1G RAM.  Probably the driver.
> Well, it is taking up to 3.5 seconds for the windows
> in a workspace to get populated and fully visible
> when I switch to that workspace.

What is the load avg on the system in question?  I have seen similar on
my system when the load avg starts to climb (anything > 5 is really
bad).  But, when he load avg is low, redraws should be good.

> It used to be almost instantaneous in F13.
> I have 2GB ram, and 12 GB swap space, but
> very few apps running. Most of the time I have
> 6 workspaces, each with a separate FireFox window,

Firefox is a resource *PIG*.  Since it is one application, I'd look into
how much memory it is using (both in ram and in swap), and whether or
not any of its windows are doing anything (like displaying FLASH or
active JAVA applets).

> and up to 4 4 workspaces, each with a gnome terminal.
> and 1 workspace with Thunderbird.

How big are your mailboxes?  Thunderbird can also slow you down if you
have large mailboxes.

> Hardly any space is used in swap. To wit:
> 
> # swapon -s
> Filename                Type        Size    Used    Priority
> /dev/sda3            partition    4200992   17540     -1
> /dev/sdb2            partition    8385924    0        -2

What does your performance look like after you close *every* firefox
window and thunderbird?  [make sure firefox is no longer running.]

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at verizon.net
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)