Changing background in gnome-appearance-properties locks entire desktop for 10 seconds

[Jens Askengren]

When changing the desktop wallpaper using gnome-appearance-properties the desktop is frozen for about 10 seconds.
This is a quite fast machine. I'd never expect it to take more than a second or two.

Is the application scaling down a huge vector image or something?
Could that happen in a separate thread maybe?

[Jens Askengren (jens-askengren)]

I should add that the freeze affects the entire desktop, not just the appearance dialog.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, what ubuntu version do you run, do you use GNOME, does it happen with any image, what do you call desktop there? the nautilus desktop view or any desktop application which is running?

[Jens Askengren (jens-askengren)]

I'm running GNOME on the Ubuntu Januty beta.

The nautilus desktop is disabled (g-conf key /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop), but toggling that setting does not affect this issue.

The window manager (compiz), the panel and any other running application freezes for about 10-20 seconds. Keyboard and mouse events seem to be queued up.

I can do some stracing if that would help.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you look at top if the ressource usage jumps when having the issue? does it happen on any image?

[Jens Askengren (jens-askengren)]

The X server is at 100% cpu usage during the freeze.
Image size, type or fill/stretch settings does not have any effect on the resource usage.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

what videocard and driver do you use? could you add your Xorg.0.log and xorg.conf to the bug?

[Jens Askengren (jens-askengren)]

nvidia version 180

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G71 [Quadro FX 2500M] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 019b
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
        Memory at ed000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        Memory at ee000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        I/O ports at ef00 [size=128]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at efe00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [68] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
        Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel <?>
        Capabilities: [128] Power Budgeting <?>
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia
        Kernel modules: nvidia, nvidiafb

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you try if that's still an issue when using the opensource nv driver?

[Jens Askengren (jens-askengren)]

This indeed works better with the nv driver.
That driver, however gives only 8bpp and it seems impossible get a higher depth even tweeking xorg.conf.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue is rather a nvidia driver one

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Same here, but running gnome-appearance-properties as root works fine...

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I've posted a new version of the -nvidia driver to our xorg-edgers PPA,
would you mind testing it either on Jaunty or Karmic and see if it
resolves this bug?

Get nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 - 185.18.14 here:

  https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

We're closing this bug since it is has been some time with no response from the original reporter. However, if the issue still exists please feel free to reopen with the requested information. Also, if you could, please test against the latest development version of Ubuntu, since this confirms the bug is one we may be able to pass upstream for help.

[Acid_1 (hainzy)]

This happens to me too... Everytime I change a background. 15 second freeze. And I'm using the 173.14.20 nVidia driver. The newer ones do it too, just I find the older one more stable.