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Old 21st July 2010
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Default Does anyone know why Gnome is so slow on BSD?

This is kind of a "WTF realisation" kind of thread, if you pardon my American .


I just converted my laptop from FreeBSD RELENG_8 to Ubuntu 10.04, the principal reasons being DropBox, GFire, and not enough time to be shoe horning the suckers into working on FreeBSD. Being able to use google-chrome instead of a resource hogging mozilla firefox is also a huge plus... hehe.


Before the conversion, I had been using Gnome 2 and FVWM 2.5 Devel compiled from Ports. The former for a heavy-weight desktop session and the latter for when working off battery (when a vtty isn't good enough), or as a thin client. Gnome was rigged to run with visual effects turned off instead of the normal (the difference on Ubuntu seems to be none=metacity; normal=compiz stuff). To speed up the startup, I also had turned off unneeded startup apps, like the update checker and what not.

FreeBSD -> about 25-30 seconds from login to when my panels loaded.


I noticed something startling when I booted Ubuntu -> Gnome runs at ludicrous speed! The kind of difference is so big, that when I used it on FreeBSD: Gnome on this laptop reminded me of KDE 3.4 on a 500Mhz/384MB P3 box - yeah man. Now that it's running Ubuntu, Gnome is so fast that I can't even believe I'm still using the same 2.0Ghz/1GB Sempron... it's like jaw dropping.


Ubuntu -> Snap of the fingers from the login to the panels loaded.


I assume that it would be equal or slower on OpenBSD and NetBSD, but this much difference is just freaking insane. Does anyone know what causes it? I can only think of two possibilities: moving more of gnome into the startup sequence, or there is something that Gnome depends on, that FreeBSDs equaliv to is just insanely slow.

*scratches head*
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