gnome slow to load after kernel upgrade
 

This is a minor issue but it is bugging me. I was running slackware 10.0 with kernel 2.4.26. I had tried many unsuccessful attempts at upgrading to 2.6.8.1, and decided to start small. I figured I would upgrade to 2.4.27 and see how things go. The kernel compile went great with the help of many of the posts here, but now Gnome is REALLY slow to load. Everything works as it should and I don't have any errors when I run dmesg. But when I login to gnome, it starts and then sits and waits and finally loads. I can see each individual icon show up under the gnome 2.6 splashscreen (nautilius, etc.). With the stock installation of slack 10 they used to fly by. Any ideas on what went wrong? It isn't data transfer from my harddrive since the drive actually stops between me logging in and the splashscreen showing up. I've searched, but can't find anyone that has had this problem. I think I missed a setting in the config of the new kernel. I just can't figure out what it is. I stripped off everything I didn't need so I thought it would be faster. Thanks in advance for any help.

I wouldn't be positive that it isn't your hard drive. Why don't you use

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

( or whatever your primary hard drive is ) to get some benchmarks on the drive using both kernels to really convince yourself that it isn't the hard drive that is the bottleneck.

The reason that I think that it might be the drive is that IDE drives have specific optimizations you can enable in the kernel.

Also, you should check to make sure that you got the processor type right, and try enabling the 'preemptible kernel' option in the config.

~Andrew

I double checked my config file and I have the correct processor and I did choose preemptible kernel. Here are the results with the new kernel:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1564 MB in 2.00 seconds = 782.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 170 MB in 3.00 seconds = 56.67 MB/sec

I haven't done the old kernel because I forgot to mention that even if I boot up with the old kernel (I made sure to add the old kernel to my lilo.conf) gnome still takes as long to load. I thought it was very weird that compiling a new kernel would affect the old one. I can post the results of hdparm with the old kernel if you guys think it would help.

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