Dash takes a long time to open when running Mir on a netbook with i915 graphics

[Brendan Donegan]

I've installed Mir on an old Samsung netbook (N310) with an Atom CPU and onboard graphics. Everything seems to be normal, expect when I open the dash the following happens:

1.) Press the Super key to open the Dash
2.) Wait 60 seconds
3.) A 'ghost' of the Dash appears (high alpha value)
4.) Wait 60 more seconds
5.) Dash is at last usable

Closing the Dash works at the usual speed (not instant but acceptable)

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Logs all seem to indicate it is an accelerated X session - Chris, any idea what might be happening here?

Brendan - I assume this does work fast when XMir is not enabled?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

We used to have this kind of bug reported all the time. It's quite possible there's a performance regression in Unity.

Please try regular X and report if it's any better. To do that, you need to remove "type=unity" from /etc/lightdm/* and /etc/lightdm/*/*. Then reboot. Same problem now (without Mir) ?

Please also attach more system information by running this command:
    apport-collect 1195692

[Chris (chris1974)]

Same problem with ASUS EeePC 1000HE

[Chris (chris1974)]

scroll over launcher cpu load 30-50%
click on dash cpu load 100%

before installing mir everything worked ok

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Unity because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for unity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Confirmed. I notice this is still happening with the latest saucy images on netbooks. Generally everything works fine until you open the dash. And then you have *minutes* of waiting.

In the past we thought this was due to graphics load. But I think more likely is the simple issue that netbooks only have 1GB RAM usually. A large chunk is consumed by graphics, and the rest is not big enough to cope with Unity7's high memory consumption. So I think we're probably just thrashing. I have yet to confirm this theory...

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Invalid for Mir, BTW. This is a very old bug. Probably a duplicate. We've been aware of Unity doing this on netbooks for some years.