Slow logout with Gnome, FC3

[Simon Andrews]

Greg Trounson wrote:
> Gidday,
> 
> I have a clean FC3 install here on an Athlon64 with an ATi Radeon (using 
> standard 'radeon' driver).  Most operations are nice and fast, except 
> for logging out of Gnome.
> 
> When I select "log out" and confirm, I'm dropped back to the desktop 
> which I can no longer interact with, and can only watch while the system 
> takes two minutes before bringing me back to the login screen.  I can 
> CTRL_ALT_BKSPACE to kill X, and I can CTRL_ALT_F1 to a terminal during 
> this time.

Oh yes - that sounds very familiar.  We've had this to varying extents 
since FC2 (and it got really bad with FC3).  I think I even started a 
thread about it about a month back, but didn't get anywhere.  I got a 
couple of straces from the logout process as it was hanging, but there 
were so many open file descriptors when it hung I never tracked down 
exactly what was happening.

However, the good news is that our machine which previously suffered 
from this has now been cured.  The bad news is I don't exactly know what 
fixed it, but I can make a couple of suggestions.

The fix happened about the time of the last kernel update, so make sure 
you're all up to date and see if that helps.  There were some gnome 
componenet upgrades at the same time so I'd suspect either of these as a 
likely suspect.

The other thing I changed around the time of the fix was to remove all 
traces of rhn from my system, this included the daemon and rhn-applet. 
Don't know if this was a cause, but it's certainly a candidate.

Hope one of these helps.

Simon.