I am experiencing very slow scrolling while browsing the web. It looks like a slideshow. The problem exists in both Firefox and Konqueror. It seems worst in gnome, but it's still pretty bad in KDE. Gnome also seems slower in general (perhaps it's because of XGL?). Would updating Gnome to 2.14 fix it (and/or how do I do that)? I am relatively new to linux, so any help is appreciated. Thanks!
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Slow Scrolling/Performance Problems
- Thread starter Kyle Smith
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I would guess is that your X is not configured right. What video card do you have (if you don't know, run lspci from the command line)? And what does your /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or /etc/X11/xfree86.conf if you have an old distro) look like?
I'm on a dell inspiron 1200 laptop. It's got intel 915 integrated graphics with 256MB of ram. The part that confuses me is that the XGL animations aren't slow at all, but scrolling is. I should mention that I'm using Suse 10.1 and that I set firefox's browser.cache.memory.capacity to 16384, if that matters. I'm not on the machine now, so I'll post the X config. later.
# /.../<BR># SaX generated X11 config file<BR># Created on: 2006-06-24T14:53:58-0400.<BR>#<BR># Version: 7.1<BR># Contact: Marcus Schaefer <sax@suse.de>, 2005<BR># Contact: SaX-User list <https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/sax-users><BR>#<BR># Automatically generated by [ISaX] (7.1)<BR># PLEASE DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE!<BR>#<BR><BR>Section "Files"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/PEX"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/misc:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/75dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/100dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/Type1"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin7/75dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/baekmuk:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/japanese:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/kwintv"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/uni:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ucs/misc:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ucs/75dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ucs/100dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/hellas/misc:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/hellas/75dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/hellas/100dpi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/hellas/Type1"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/sgi:unscaled"<BR> FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/xtest"<BR> FontPath "/opt/kde3/share/fonts"<BR> InputDevices "/dev/gpmdata"<BR> InputDevices "/dev/input/mice"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR>Section "ServerFlags"<BR> Option "AllowMouseOpenFail" "on"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR>Section "Module"<BR> Load "freetype"<BR> Load "type1"<BR> Load "dbe"<BR> Load "glx"<BR> Load "extmod"<BR> Load "v4l"<BR> Load "dri"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR>Section "InputDevice"<BR> Driver "kbd"<BR> Identifier "Keyboard[0]"<BR> Option "Protocol" "Standard"<BR> Option "XkbLayout" "us"<BR> Option "XkbModel" "pc104"<BR> Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR><BR>Section "InputDevice"<BR> Driver "synaptics"<BR> Identifier "Mouse[1]"<BR> Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"<BR> Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on"<BR> Option "Name" "Touchpad"<BR> Option "SHMConfig" "on"<BR> Option "Vendor" "Synaptics"<BR> Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR>Section "InputDevice"<BR> Driver "mouse"<BR> Identifier "Mouse[3]"<BR> Option "Buttons" "5"<BR> Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"<BR> Option "Name" "ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse"<BR> Option "Protocol" "explorerps/2"<BR> Option "Vendor" "Sysp"<BR> Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR><BR>Section "Monitor"<BR> Option "CalcAlgorithm" "XServerPool"<BR> DisplaySize 300 230<BR> HorizSync 30-50<BR> Identifier "Monitor[0]"<BR> ModelName "C8365 150X09 LCD MONITOR"<BR> Option "DPMS"<BR> VendorName "LPL"<BR> VertRefresh 43-60<BR> UseModes "Modes[0]"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR><BR>Section "Modes"<BR> Identifier "Modes[0]"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR><BR>Section "Screen"<BR> DefaultDepth 24<BR> SubSection "Display"<BR> Depth 15<BR> Modes "1024x768" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480" <BR> EndSubSection<BR> SubSection "Display"<BR> Depth 16<BR> Modes "1024x768" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480" <BR> EndSubSection<BR> SubSection "Display"<BR> Depth 24<BR> Modes "1024x768" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480" <BR> EndSubSection<BR> SubSection "Display"<BR> Depth 8<BR> Modes "1024x768" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480" <BR> EndSubSection<BR> Device "Device[0]"<BR> Identifier "Screen[0]"<BR> Monitor "Monitor[0]"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR><BR>Section "Device"<BR> BoardName "915 GM"<BR> BusID "0:2:0"<BR> Driver "i810"<BR> Identifier "Device[0]"<BR> Option "SaXDualHead"<BR> Option "Clone"<BR> Option "NoDDC"<BR> Option "LFP" ""<BR> Option "SaXDualMonitorVendor" "--> VESA"<BR> Option "SaXDualOrientation" "off"<BR> Option "SaXDualResolution" "off"<BR> Option "CloneRefresh" "50-60"<BR> Option "SaXDualMode" "off"<BR> Option "SaXDualHSync" "off"<BR> Option "SaXDualMonitorModel" "1024X768@60HZ"<BR> Option "SaXDualVSync" "50-60"<BR> Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"<BR> Screen 0<BR> VendorName "Intel"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR><BR>Section "ServerLayout"<BR> Identifier "Layout[all]"<BR> InputDevice "Keyboard[0]" "CoreKeyboard"<BR> InputDevice "Mouse[1]" "CorePointer"<BR> InputDevice "Mouse[3]" "SendCoreEvents"<BR> Option "Clone" "off"<BR> Option "Xinerama" "off"<BR> Screen "Screen[0]"<BR>EndSection<BR><BR><BR>Section "DRI"<BR> Group "video"<BR> Mode 0660<BR>EndSection<BR><BR>Section "Extensions"<BR>EndSection
Only 256M of system memory? That's pretty low, considering that a fair bit of it will have to be reserved for the i915 card. I recommend buying more RAM, and adding<BR>Option "DRI" "true"<BR>VideoRam 65536<BR>to the "Device" section (note: that will reserve 64M of memory for the graphics driver. If you still experience problems, you can up the VideoRam to 131072, but I doubt that will be necessary since you are running at 1024x768).<BR>Oh, and make sure you are part of the video group.
I already tried buying more RAM, but this POS Dell will only accept memory that Mikey Dell personally blessed.<BR><BR>On a related note, when I login to gnome, my hard drive goes crazy for about 15 minutes. I disabled Beagle and that helped a lot, but there still seems to be something clgging up my system. The worst is when I open software management, which takes literally 20-30 minutes to start.<BR><BR>I've read before that linux doesn't suffer from hard drive fragmentation, but I can't help but wonder if that's a part of the problem. Are there any good defragmenters for linux that support reiser?
The thing is, GNOME is really designed for >=256M. So is Firefox. However, to get decent performance out of the i915 (such as fast scrolling or the ability to play games), you are going to need to give the graphics card more memory, which will cut into how much memory GNOME's bloat can use. I have never heard of reiserfs fragmenting and I've used it heavily for several years. If a program is taking 20-30 minutes to start, I would guess that's either a bug in the program or you are out of memory and the kernel has to swap like crazy.<BR><BR>To see why something takes 20-30 minutes to start, you can launch it using strace (e.g. "strace /usr/bin/some-odd-suse-program"). To look at where the system resources are going during those 20 minutes, use tools like top, vmstat, mpstat, and sysprof.<BR><BR>As for XGL, I don't know how you are using it on an i915. My impression was that the current i810 driver lacks some feature that xgl likes, and so xgl runs like molasses on it.<BR><BR>EDIT: try just adding Option "DRI" "true" to the "Device" section of xorg.conf; see if that helps with the scrolling.
After several near catastrophies, I added Option "DRI" "true" to xorg.conf. Maybe it's placebo, but the scrolling is now suboptimal, but acceptable. I'll have to play around with strace later. Thanks for your help so far!<BR><BR>As far as the XGL, it gave me a warming to the effect of "Blah blah, I don't recognize your hardware", but I ignored it and it seems to be working fine. The only time it slows down is when I have the rain effect on and I try to wiggle windows.
Holy Shi-ite! I found a 256 stick that was compatible, and now everything is tremendously faster. The software management now opens in 3 minutes instead of 30. The jury's still out on the scrolling.<BR><BR>Edit: Would upgrading Gnome to 2.14 help with performance? If so, how do I do that?
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