Gnome slow at start up

Sun Dec 7 10:32:03 PST 2008

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Jeremy Messenger <mezz7 at cox.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:11:08 -0600, Fernando Apesteguía
> <fernando.apesteguia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Jeremy Messenger <mezz7 at cox.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:32:21 -0600, Fernando Apesteguía
>>> <fernando.apesteguia at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus at marcuscom.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, 2008-12-06 at 21:06 +0100, Fernando Apesteguía wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Jeremy Messenger <mezz7 at cox.net>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> > On Sat, 06 Dec 2008 12:04:00 -0600, Fernando Apesteguía
>>>>>> > <fernando.apesteguia at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> >> Hi all,
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> I'm running FreeBSD 7.1 BETA2 for AMD64.
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> With this version, Gnome starts up very slowly. If I take a look at
>>>>>> >> the session properties window, it seems nautilus takes a very long
>>>>>> >> time trying to connect. However, after some time, it connects but
>>>>>> >> the
>>>>>> >> gnome-wm script is marked as Status UNKNOWN (That column of the
>>>>>> >> treeview is not documented and I had to look at the code...).
>>>>>> >> So it seems at the end, metacity is somehow stalled during start
>>>>>> >> up.
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> The --purge-delay=5000 as suggested here
>>>>>> >> (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=445) causes other
>>>>>> >> processes (gnome-at-visual and gnome-volume-manager) to be marked
>>>>>> >> as
>>>>>> >> not connected
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> If I only set the --warn-delay=5000 I get gnome-wm (metacity in my
>>>>>> >> case) to be marked as not responding.
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> In the end, everything seems to work fine. However IMHO, it is a
>>>>>> >> bit
>>>>>> >> dirty to use these two options because they only mask the problem,
>>>>>> >> but
>>>>>> >> it seems clear there are some faulting processes.
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> Any ideas of what the problem is?
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#q20
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My bad,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I should have pointed this out as reference:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2008-December/188032.html
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Any more ideas?
>>>>>
>>>>> You can try ktrace'ing the slow-start processes to see if that yields
>>>>> anything interesting.  However, it would be more beneficial to have
>>>>> these binaries compiled with debugging symbols, then use gdb to get
>>>>> backtraces from them when they're starting up.
>>>>
>>>> I will try with ktrace or truss to see what happens.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> That said, the problem may be some bad configuration pieces.  You might
>>>>> try creating a new, clean account, and see if the problem shows up
>>>>> there.
>>>>
>>>> Yes, it does. I created a new account on the system and I got the same
>>>> result. I have a laptop running 7.0 Release -p5 and I only added the
>>>> lines to /etc/hosts to speed up gnome. Nothing else was necessary.
>>>
>>> Can you show us your /etc/rc.conf and /etc/hosts? Also, output of 'ping
>>> `hostname`'. Do you have your own DNS cache server? If you do, have you
>>> check to make sure you have same hostname with your DNS cache and your
>>> machine? A few months ago, one of my friend asked me to help on his
>>> machine
>>> for samba problem in GNOME when trying to double click on his samba icon
>>> for
>>> slowness and not really works very well. It turned out that his DNS cache
>>> server (he forgot to change/update in his DNS cache) was mismatch the
>>> hostname in his personal machine. Althought, it doesn't affect slow issue
>>> on
>>> his GNOME desktop but only on samba icon.
>>
>> Hi again,
>>
>> Here you are:
>>
>> [fernape at beastie /usr/home/fernape]$ ping -c 5 `hostname`
>> PING beastie (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
>> 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.022 ms
>> 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.026 ms
>> 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.025 ms
>> 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.023 ms
>> 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.020 ms
>>
>> --- beastie ping statistics ---
>> 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
>> round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.020/0.023/0.026/0.002 ms
>>
>> [fernape at beastie /usr/home/fernape]$ cat /etc/rc.conf
>>
> <snip>
>>
>> [fernape at beastie /usr/home/fernape]$ cat /etc/hosts
>> # $FreeBSD: src/etc/hosts,v 1.16 2003/01/28 21:29:23 dbaker Exp $
>> #
>> # Host Database
>> #
>> # This file should contain the addresses and aliases for local hosts that
>> # share this file.  Replace 'my.domain' below with the domainname of your
>> # machine.
>> #
>> # In the presence of the domain name service or NIS, this file may
>> # not be consulted at all; see /etc/nsswitch.conf for the resolution
>> order.
>> #
>> #
>> ::1                     localhost localhost.my.domain
>> #127.0.0.1              localhost localhost.my.domain
>> 127.0.0.1               beastie localhost localhost.my.domain gnome-rocks
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> I like it. ;-) Anyway, I think it looks fine. I am not sure what made your
> GNOME slow, so you should do ktrace as marcus has requested.

I'll go for ktrace ASAP (currently the machine is doing some stuff in
Linux). Should I ktrace metacity, nautilus or both?

Thanks

>
> Cheers,
> Mezz
>
>
> --
> mezz7 at cox.net  -  mezz at FreeBSD.org
> FreeBSD GNOME Team
> http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/  -  gnome at FreeBSD.org
>