Appalling desktop performance in F8

[Todd Denniston]

Alastair Neil wrote, On 01/08/2008 11:14 AM:
> Has anyone else experienced terrible desktop performance with F8.  Under F7
> on the same hardware I never had any significant problems, now it appears
> several times a day my desktop locks up (or appears to), mouse movement
> seems unaffected yet windows are unresponsive and I cannot move of select
> any windows or panel objects, even the ctrl-alt-f virtual terminal sequence
> seems to be ignored.  The media player continues happily playing audio. CPU
> load seems pretty high during these lockups and pulseaudio appears to be
> consuming much of it.  Usually if I am patient the system unlocks, however
> often I resort to extreme measures.
> 
> Typically I used to have under F7 firefox, thunderbird several gnome
> terminals, rhythmbox and occasionally openoffice open.  I have now resorted
> to epiphany, thunderbird and quodlibet ( I cannot use evolution these days,
> I have become addicted to the grouped by sort G  feature).
> 
> The system itself is a P4 2.8 GHZ Dell optiplex 270 with 2 Gbytes of memory
> and an older nvidia card with two 19 inch monitors. I am using the
> xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx drivers and my home directory is mounted via NFSv3
> over gigabit ethernet.
> 
> I'd appreciate knowing if anyone else has had similar problems before I roll
> back to F7.  It is possible that I am having hardware problems, so the F7
> roll back may not help.
> 
> Regards, Alastair Neil
> 
> 

Has anyone else been given access to the LAN you are on lately, or a new 
project started?  like sending video or audio across the LAN, or new users 
consuming all the available nfs daemons.

instead of keeping ANY of it's configuration in core, while running, gnome 
keeps and references it's configuration from the file system[1]. This means 
that if NFS hiccups for a moment so will gnome, and when gnome hiccups you 
will not be able to give input to any of the other programs.

I have seen this even with FC4, though usually I can get 'ctrl-alt-f virtual 
terminal' to work (in a few moments), and there is no pulseaudio.

[1] at least from what I have seen of it's operation.  Man I miss using fvwm, 
which IIRC may have made a comeback in F8.
-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane)
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter