Slow start for desktop effects

[Marius Gedminas]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 05:55:56PM +0100, Michele wrote:
> I have recently installed Gutsy on a (rather old) laptop and I have a number
> of small issues which I would like to expose in a number of emails.
> 
> This is installment one:

Ah, so I didn't miss it, it just arrived later than the other ones, for
some reason.

> After I enter the user name and password I can start reasonably quickly to
> work ( e.g. type in the terminal) on a metacity desktop.

Good for you.  I have to wait 35 seconds for my desktop to fully load,
and this is on a brand new laptop.  The disk is busily reading something
all that time, perhaps I just have too many panel applets.

> After 4 or 5
> minutes then compiz-fusion kicks in (fusion icon, desktop cube, window
> decorator and the rest). Even if I leave the computer alone, it takes
> roughly the same time for the desktop effects to start and the system
> monitor does not show any activity.

No CPU activity?  What about disk activity?

> fusion-icon is registered in the start
> up programs list.
> 
> Is there a way to speed up the start of the desktop effects or at least to
> understand why this is happening?

If both the CPU and the disk are idle during those 4-5 minutes, then
it's probably some timeout.  Sometimes these are caused by a
misconfigured loopback network interface (you can check that with
ifconfig lo in a terminal), sometimes by broken DNS settings (e.g.
hostname in /etc/hostname not matching the one in /etc/hosts).

If you check with gnome-system-monitor (or top, or pstree) during those
minutes of idleness, do you see any compiz processes?

If you try to restart compiz with Alt-F2, "compiz --replace", does it
start instantly or do you get the same delay?

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Dijkstra probably hates me
		-- Linus Torvalds, in kernel/sched.c
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