[Gllug] Sluggishness and confusion

Russell Howe rhowe at wiss.co.uk
Mon Feb 7 10:40:46 UTC 2005


Jack Bertram wrote:
> Am I expecting too high a standard?  Is it Gnome's fault?  (To give
> context, when I ran fluxbox on the Celeron it was much more responsive
> than Gnome is now on the Athlon64).  

Gnome in Debian seems very very slow to me (not tried Ubuntu...) 
compared to the few minutes I spent playing with Fedora where it seemed 
pretty much lightning-fast. Maybe they do some fancy prelinking or 
something? I just remember gnome-terminal opening within a second in 
Fedora whereas it took multiple seconds in Debian on the same box.

You could always try just running fluxbox without all the gnome stuff on 
your new Athlon64 as a comparison...

Of course, there's many more things than just the CPU when it comes to 
performance. Is there enough RAM for example? Running a full Gnome setup 
with the panel, metacity, gnome-session-manager etc is going to use a 
*lot* more RAM than running a fairly simple windowmanager like fluxbox. 
I'd suggest a minimum of 384M RAM for Gnome, preferably more.

Also, you might want to look at epiphany instead of fluxbox - it has a 
GTK2/gnome interface rather than firefox's XUL one, so the memory 
footprint should be lighter due to the interactions between 
copy-on-write and dynamic libraries. It might not make a huge amount of 
difference with the behemoth that is Gecko, but you can always try it & 
see...

-- 
Russ
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