Gnome with dual head (Xinerama) very slow

malo_umoran · 08-21-2004, 03:10 AM

Hi,

I was using KDE with my dual head system and KDE was doing this job pretty fine. I installed on my laptop Slackware with Gnome, and I loved it. A few days, I installed it also on my desktop system.

But when I start Gnome, I takes a lot more ressource than KDE ... I have 512 Mb RAM, and GNOME with 4 workspaces and with a few application (firefox, gftp, gkrellm, mplayer) takes all the memory. I started "top -S" to see what is going on, I was really terrified:

Code:

top - 10:10:33 up 13 days,  8:09,  1 user,  load average: 1.62, 1.14, 0.77
Tasks: 146 total,   2 running, 143 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 88.7% us,  9.7% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.3% wa,  1.3% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    515124k total,   504548k used,    10576k free,    48008k buffers
Swap:  1453872k total,   131808k used,  1322064k free,   218268k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 6456 root      15   0  244m  91m 150m S 25.9 18.2 349:37.89 X
18827 mm        15   0 63220  40m  29m S  1.3  8.1   0:49.14 firefox-bin
18868 mm        16   0 63220  40m  29m S  0.0  8.1   0:00.04 firefox-bin
18869 mm        16   0 63220  40m  29m S  0.0  8.1   0:00.12 firefox-bin
18879 mm        15   0 63220  40m  29m S  0.0  8.1   0:00.38 firefox-bin
10432 mm        16   0 63220  40m  29m S  0.0  8.1   0:00.00 firefox-bin
10479 mm        15   0 63220  40m  29m S  0.0  8.1   0:00.00 firefox-bin
 1464 mm        15   0 46708  31m  31m S  5.0  6.2   1:05.65 gmplayer
 1470 mm        15   0 39932  23m  31m S  0.0  4.6   0:01.17 gmplayer
 6513 mm        15   0 40852  19m  17m S  1.3  3.9   8:13.31 gnome-terminal
 6585 mm        16   0 40852  19m  17m S  0.0  3.9   0:00.15 gnome-terminal
 6591 mm        16   0 40852  19m  17m S  0.0  3.9   0:00.00 gnome-terminal
 5966 mm        15   0 35872  19m  29m S  0.0  3.9   0:00.26 mplayer
 6511 mm        15   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   1:34.49 nautilus
 6514 mm        16   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:00.16 nautilus
 6519 mm        16   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:00.02 nautilus
 6540 mm        16   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:00.00 nautilus
 6541 mm        15   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:08.99 nautilus
 6544 mm        15   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:17.25 nautilus
 6545 mm        15   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:09.12 nautilus
 6546 mm        16   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:00.18 nautilus
 6568 mm        15   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:00.04 nautilus
19676 mm        16   0 37100  18m  19m S  0.0  3.7   0:00.00 nautilus
 6509 mm        15   0 23200  11m  17m S  0.7  2.4   0:48.56 gnome-panel
  521 mm        15   0 14248 9428  11m S  0.0  1.8   0:06.57 gftp-gtk
  524 mm        16   0 14248 9428  11m S  0.0  1.8   0:00.25 gftp-gtk
 6548 mm        15   0 31472 9384  14m S  0.3  1.8  16:45.22 gkrellm
 6581 mm        16   0 31472 9384  14m S  0.0  1.8   4:40.40 gkrellm
 6561 mm        15   0 19248 7652  15m S  0.0  1.5   0:10.75 gweather-applet
 6602 mm        16   0 19248 7652  15m S  0.0  1.5   0:00.15 gweather-applet
 6603 mm        15   0 19248 7652  15m S  0.0  1.5   0:00.61 gweather-applet
 7210 mm        16   0 19248 7652  15m S  0.0  1.5   0:00.32 gweather-applet
 3540 mm        15   0 11928 6256  10m S  0.0  1.2   0:00.20 consolehelper-g
 6613 mm        15   0 16864 6112  15m S  0.0  1.2   0:09.84 drivemount_appl
 6504 mm        15   0 12864 5516  10m S  0.0  1.1   2:06.35 metacity
...
and so on ...

every application has about 3-7 processes and every of these is taking alot of RAM ...

did you see this:
Mem: 515124k total, 504548k used, 10576k free, 48008k buffers

have I missed something? what is going on here?

I hope you know more than I.

thanks a lot, I would appreciate any help.

M.

carboncopy · 09-18-2004, 09:22 PM

Generally gnome (and maybe KDE too) use up a lot of RAM. But, I don't think that is much problem.

I run gnome with xinerama on too on my Athlon-XP 1800+ with 1024Mbyte RAM, Radeon 9200SE with no prob.

I also use gnome on Pentium 3-500MHz, 512Mb, Geforce4MX460 with not much performance diff from Athlon-XP machine. (Under normal using circumstances).

You said that it is slow in the title, but didn't mention it in the post. Is it just RAM usage you are concern about? If it is, don't have to worry to much about it (I have learned) if it doesn't slow down your system.

malo_umoran · 09-20-2004, 02:11 AM

Hi,

I found out that this isn't Gnome problem (I am also using Fluxbox, and I have also tested KDE), but X problem.

This is how the situation looks like:
- I have 2 graphic cards (APG GF2 and PCI Radeon 7000)
- I have 2 displays and TV

I use all of them at the same time ... I use 2 displays to do my work, and TV as a 3rd display for watching mythtv/mplayer etc. I am using this configuration all the time and I had it with FreeBSD-current. Xinerama is "On" in xorg.conf.

Slackware takes about 100 Mb of memory (512 Mb at the moment) without X and I can live with it. But when I run "startx", all the system takes about 400 Mb ... I am using almost all 512 Mb when I start Firefox, GKrellm and the system starts using Swap ... And after my Slackware is getting slower, because RAM is full, and it has to use Swap

I know that Radeon 7000 makes it slower because of lack of drivers, but that has nothing to taking so much memory. I didn't have such problems with XFree under FreeBSD.

I tested this with Xorg 6.7.0 and 6.8.1 ... I tested it also with XFree 4.3.0. I only used packages from Linuxpackages.net. I didn't compiled it myself, but maybe I should. I tried to compile XFree a few years ago, but it was a real pain in the ***, so I gave it up.

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot

M.

p.s.:
For some reason, dual/triple head support works with Xorg only if I instal both XFree and Xorg. I installed both od them, but still use Xorg ... If I delete XFree package, my dual/triple head configuration doesn't work. I suppose there are some libraries in XFree, which are missing in Xorg and which are being used for this dual head support.

carboncopy · 09-21-2004, 03:05 AM

I use a Radeon 9200SE which comes with dual head alread instead of using two different video card to achieve dual head/ triple head view in your case.

My point is, I do not have to have XFree installed to acheive dual head view (xinerama).

As for such heavy resources usage even without xwindow, it is quite unusual. I can't help much other then that.

Maybe you can try switching off most of the services in /etc/rc.d and start it one by one while observing the processes.

malo_umoran · 09-21-2004, 03:15 AM

my radeon also has dual head support and I am using radeon for my computer displays ... GF2 is being used only as a tv-out solution ...

M.