Does anyone know why Gnome is so slow on BSD?

[TerryP]

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*

[Pjoter]

Hi TerryP,

all I can is to confirm that this is truth. I used to run NetBSD-current. Now I run Arch Linux (not b/c of Gnome but Java and other things). Anyway the Evolution I used under NetBDS was just sloooooow- under Arch Linux Evolution starts like a rocket and the e-mail checking/retriving is also faster (I use Gmail so imap).

I don't know the reason- maybe some "linuxism" behind Gnome?

Piotr.

[rpindy]

Have you tried Xfce? If Wikipedia is correct, Xfce is 12x smaller than GNOME and 14x smaller than KDE. I'd like to verify that, but I've used GNOME on OpenBSD and it worked fine but downloading with all 12 pkg_add commands took a while.

[Mr-Biscuit]

I'm curious to the point that I'm going to try installing FreeBSD + GNOME on a laptop. I'll tell you how the performance goes for me.

[klanger]

I've tried FBSD-8.1-rc with gnome-lite.

Time between startx and working DE was about 15sec.

[Mr-Biscuit]

Chrome works on FreeBSD.
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread...ghlight=chrome

Other options if dropbox doesn't work, there are other options. There is also finding what requirements it needs.
Xfire/gfire will work.

[vato]

Originally Posted by klanger

Time between startx and working DE was about 15sec.

yo flying man! me on gnome-lite like 3minutes!!

[adamk]

Having used Ubuntu+gnome and FreeBSD+gnome, I just don't see it. Whatever speed difference there is is negligible to me.