Fedora Core 5 -- slow GUI performance

Motor motor1024 at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 30 11:34:30 UTC 2006


I have an AMD Athlon XP2000+ with a Matrox G550 card. I used to use it
with satisfactorily with FC4. I recently upgraded to FC5, and I'm finding
that the graphics performance is quite poor.

The major problem was Firefox, and I solved that by telling firefox not to
use Pango (and by extension Cairo -- as I understand it) with the
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 environment variable. However, the same problem
afflicts all GNOME applications. Slow redraws and generally sluggish
feelings and high CPU usage generally -- gfx seem particularly badly
affected when heavy CPU using programs are used.

I notice it particularly with Nautilus in List view mode... which, as a
naive assumption, I take to be because it has lots of text. The slow down
doesn't seem to affect Nedit (which doesn't use Pango). For example,
resizing a GNOME terminal window when it is sitting on top of GNOME app
with lots of text, I can practically watch the GNOME terminal window
redraw itself.

This... well... sucks, and is a pretty major regression from FC4,
especially since the Matrox G550 has Free software drivers. Is it ever
likely to get fixed, or am I just stuck? Is there anyway to get Pango in
FC5 not to use Cairo (assuming that is the culprit)?




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