Performance issue. Perhaps video card/driver related.

[RedFedora]

Hi all.
I installed Fedora 12 on a new laptop the other day. All my hardware was detected and everything works perfectly. Or almost. Every once in a while, my display will become completely unresponsive or will become very slow. Sometimes I'll be typing in "gedit" and I can type faster than text appears on the screen.

Eventually, after a minute or so, the screen will go back to normal and I'll have good performance again for a half hour or so.

I've checked "top" and nothing seems to be hogging the CPU (total usage is under 10%) and I've got lots of free memory. Since the lock-up usually happens when browsing "heavy" websites or unlocking the desktop, I'm assuming this problem is a hardware/driver issue. I'm using an Intel card, which I understand have had issues in recent past.

To try to improve performance and avoid these lock-ups, I've disabled all desktop effects and scaled my resolution down a little. So far it hasn't helped. Any suggestions?

[Shunyata]

Could be related to my thread http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1311718
If you try enabling the repository like I mentioned in the last post - does it work?
Also: Which version do you use (e.g. x86_64)? Which drivers? Which desktop environment?

[RedFedora]

The thread you linked to seems to be talking just about nVidia cards and drivers. I'm using an Intel card. My machine is running 32-bit Fedora 12 with the KDE4 desktop. All updates have been applied.

[Hlingler]

Try stopping and disabling unnecessary system services: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-services-f12.html

Try booting with kernel option 'nomodeset'.

V

[RedFedora]

Most of the services are already shut down. I've got cron, ancron and CUPS running. That's about it.

Tried the "nomodeset" flag. Had the same results as without it, except that my mouse was a lot more "jumpy". The issue seems to happen mostly right after a fresh boot or when coming back from a suspend. The system will be fine for a minute and then lock up for 30-60 seconds. Then be fine for a few minutes, lock up again and then be fine for hours. Or until the next suspend/resume, when it'll lock again.

During the "lock" time, my desktop will be completely unresponsive, except the mouse will move. But I can switch to a text console and run commands from there. Again, running "top" shows less than 10% of my CPU being used, about half of my RAM is used. No swap is being utilized and no programs seem to be grabbing CPU time.

I ran Fedora 12 on my five year old laptop with about a third of the CPU speed/RAM of this new one and it works fine on the older machine. So I'm assuming the issue is related to the newer hardware.