Hi all,

On my local apache web server I had installed gnome desktop, because I wanted it to use as a TV. But when I installed the gnome desktop, my requests for web pages became terribly slow (4-5 seconds!). When I deinstalled the gnome desktop, the request where fast again.
But I still want to watch TV on my server, so I wander if people know why the gnome desktop harms the performance of the server?

Best regards,

Geert

PS. with gnome desktop, ping was <1 ms, samba server worked like charm, wget localhost was <1 ms, but for some reason, when tried to get a webpage from my webserver to a remote machine, it took seriously 4-5 seconds to load a page.

GNOME is a massive load to drop on a server. You haven't specified your hardware, but if you aren't running relatively modern hardware, GNOME is going to be a pain.

Frankly, you shouldn't be trying to use a web server as a media center. You can either do one or the other well, if you are trying to do both on the same machine, performance will suffer.

That's the interesting part there... Like the previous poster, gnome is a huge thing to dump on a system, but it seems odd. No, maybe not a good idea to try and run gnome on a dedicated server, but at work we have to do it sometimes (in dev environments), and it just doesn't cause that sort of problem. Up until November I had an old P4 server used to compile and test code for developers, and it has 5 constantly running gnome sessions (in VNC). It still delivered pages quick enough for people not to complain. WAY quicker than 4-5 seconds.

So, questions:

Are you saying it took 4-5 seconds to load a static page or a dynamic page?

What distro are you using?

What hardware (just the basics, number of cpus+speed, memory, type of discs your running (ide, sata, scsi)).

Did you switch runlevels to use X, or start X from your standard runlevel? Different distros sometimes use different numbers, but the standards are 3 for multi-user no graphics, 5 for multi-user with graphics.


--Kyle

Ok, I will post my specs, it is exactly the following notbook: http://w3.tue.nl/en/services/dienst_...neration_2004/

In short: Intel Pentium M 1.7 GHz
768 MB Memory
60 GB harddisk IDE

My Distro is debian lenny

It took 4-5 seconds on both static and dynamic pages.

I am not sure about the runlevels. I did not change it myself.

So what do you say about the specs?

That's powerful enough that this just shouldn't happen.

Create a .xinitrc file with one line that says xterm, then startx. X will come up with an xterm and no controls. No gnome, nothing else.

Now test the response time of your web-server. If it's fine, gnome is the culprit, if not, your X driver.

Check to make sure gnome isn't running some personal-web server, not messing with your /etc/resolv.conf, and not turning on a firewall. Most of the problems with gnome happen when it tries to take over your OS instead of just be a desktop.

If you used the stock debian packages, post your question in a debian forum. Someone else probably ran into this problem before.

Good luck!