B/t Login and GNOME task bar

[Jonathan Berry]

On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 07:08:29 -1000, Amy M <amymom at hawaiilinux.us> wrote:
> The time it takes between the login screen and the appearance of the
> task bar (in GNOME) is awfully long.  I didn't time it, but this seems
> to be the slowest step in the entire start-up process.
> 
> One of the reasons I switched from KDE to GNOME was because the latter
> took less time to start.  Is there any way to make GNOME start faster?
> Thanks.

I have noticed this too.  I sent an email to the list about it a while
back, but never got a response.  I haven't experimented a whole lot
with it, but it seems the default layout with two panels seems to load
much faster, for some reason.  I see the slowdown as soon as I start
to customize things.
So, if you don't mind the new layout, you can try that and see if you
see an improvement.  Also, try removing some applets.  I know these
are not very good solutions.
You can try removing (after making backups of) some of the files in
you ~/.g* folders (like .gconf .gnome2 etc).  It seems things get
better if some of those files are removed.  Maybe experiment
beforehand with a new user and see if you get a speed increase.  It
seems like settings build up in those folders that start to bog things
down.  The slowdown seems to be gradual and increases with time.
Has anyone else noticed this?  Is there anyone using the default
config who can confirm that loading Gnome (especially the panel) is
faster?  Mine is taking in the 10s of seconds to load after logging in
(just as a rough estimate, maybe 10-20 seconds).  This is on a laptop
with a relatively slow spinning drive and there is a lot of drive
activity during this pause, but it seems it ought to load faster than
that.

Jonathan