Super high latency in X on Pentium D, new install...

[ACCP-James]

After a week or so of playing around with Fedora on a P4 2.4GHz machine with 1GB of RAM I found that it was to my liking so I decided to switch my primary machine over to it fron Windows. I trotted through the installation steps and didn't encounter any problems, but now that I"m up and running I'm finding a heck of a lot of trouble with X opening applications... For example, from a fresh boot if I click the launcher for a Terminal window (standard Gnome Terminal) it takes approximately 13 seconds for the window to open. Now, the interesting part is that there's no hard disk activity during this time, so it's not the application being loaded initially. Furthermore, it takes just as long to open the application a second or third time (whether the prior instances are still open or not.)

The computer is a Dell Dimension 6100 with some upgrades:
Pentium D 2.8GHz
Dell motherboard with Intel 945 express chipset
Intel onboard SATA controller, operating in ATA mode for compatibility with XP Pro x64
3GB PC3200 RAM, dual channeled
ATI Radeon x1600 PCI xPress video card (this is not properly detected, using the VESA driver, but it's not display latency I have an issue with)

I can't think of anything else that's relevant to the issue, I've checked to make sure that services I understand to be relevant are running (acpid, irqbalance in particular). I'm really clueless as to what the issue could be. As soon as I find a HOWTO that works that shows me how to install the kernel source RPM (I know how to use the vanilla kernel but I want to retain Fedora compliance as much as possible) I'll take a peek at a rebuilt kernel, but the performance from the console seems fine, so I'm not sure how much that will help.

Anyone else run in to this or know what type of thing I should look at/for?

hi what version fedora did you use x64 or i386 also have you run updates

[ACCP-James]

i386, and yes, I've installed the updates. I don't want to mess with the x64 version until I've got a grasp on how everything is supposed to work :P

[mwette]

Can be gnome issue, or window manager. Did you try to spawn a terminal
inside a terminal (i.e., by typing "gnome-terminal &").

[ACCP-James]

Haven't tried terminal from terminal, but when I open gedit from a terminal window (gedit <filename>) I get the same delay.

[ACCP-James]

I'm currently working on getting a new kernel built, some of the SMP/multi APIC stuff didn't look right in the default options, looks like they've got SMP turned on but to cover as broad a base as possilbe so I'm tweaking some that crap a bit... also trying to get my stupid ATI driver built in... we'll see what happens.

hi im curious to why you think 64bit is harder to 32bit and why you put a 32 bit system on a 64 bit machine

[ACCP-James]

Because a Pentium D isn't a 64 bit machine? It's capable of emulating 64 bit behavior, but that's it. Since the vast majority of binaries out there don't have 64 bit optimizations and there's a heck of a lot less testing done on 64 bit device drivers as of right now you're adding a very minimal performance increase (sometimes it's a decrease...) and more of a chance of incompatability.

Right now, unfortunately, most 64 bit platforms are there just so we can say we have them :P

sorry i didnt read your specs properly i have both 32 n 64 os and there is a very big difference i found when transcoding etc videos anyway from experience not having your graphics card installed properly slowed my machine down alot even though i wasnt running anything graphic tasking god nows why, but it did i suppose a machine is only as fast as the slowest part anyway gl im off for a beer

[Coolerthanyou]

It probably is a gnome or metacity issue. I get a similar thing, then switching to xfce, there's none of these strange delays. But I notice that it only happens when a network device is moving data, like when you're downloading something. When it's idle, it doesn't happen- for me anyways. And also not with all apps. Happens with gnome terminal, firefox, and open office for example, but not with nautilus. Though maybe that's because it's daemonized? I also tried different kinds of settings both in the vanilla and some patched kernels and it's been the same thing. Anyways that's also why I prefer xfce right now.

[ACCP-James]

Well, I'm not sure what fixed it, but I wound up having to boot a 2.18 kernel and voila, things were fine.. when I went back to 2.20 they stayed that way. Coulda been something not configured properly that got fixed when I was poking around at 'unrelated' stuff... who the hell knows :P