X slow with FC3
 

I am tying to use X under FC3 and am experiencing problems with the desktop being very slow and choppy. Programs seem to still load reasonably fast (as far as I can tell), but manipulating them after load is slow. For example, if I try to minimize / maximize a window it can take upwards of a couple seconds to do so. Clicking on a drop down menu results in a 1-2 second wait before the contents appear. If I have a command line terminal open, doing a simple ls results in a slow line by line draw of the results. Pressing page down in vim can sometimes take 10 seconds to refresh...

This is my first real experience with X. I used it a tiny bit some time ago with RH 8 and FC1, and they were both VERY fast (using gnome or KDE, not sure which), but went back to a prompt only install. I am still using the same system as I was back then.

I checked the procs and X - even when I only have a terminal open - is always running >30% of cpu, and is some times much higher. I have not spent much time looking for a solution as I don't use X much yet, but I am wondering if there is anything obvious I should be looking for. The problem occurs in kde, gnome and the little bare bones windower as well.

Thanks for your time.

Andrew.

What are the specs for your computer?

1.8 GHz P4
640 MB DDR 200MHz EDO Ram
ATI Rage XL (On board)
20GB HD

Not a powerhouse, but like I said, X seemed to run fine when I had RH 8.0 and FC1 on the same system.

I dropped down from millions to thousands of colours, and that seems to have helped drop the CPU by around 5-10%. Dropping the resolution does not have much of a impact though, there was little difference in performance between the 800x600 and 1600x1200 (when using gnome-terminal, for example)

However, I tried running xterm instead of gnome-terminal, and that is much faster when scrolling lots of text. Is there a way to scale down gnome-terminal, perhaps by using basic fonts instead of font server?

Anyway, everything is _working_ so I don't want anyone one to waste time trying to figure this out... I'll pick away at it whenever I get a free moment. Any suggestions still appreciated :)

Try installing the official ATI graphics driver and see if this makes any difference to your systems performance.