[Gutsy] very slow gnome startup

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson]

I installed from the tribe3 gutsy gibbon and then updated the system (without having logged in yet) from console (ctrl-alt-F1).
When I log in via gdm it takes literally minutes for the gnome desktop to show up (leading to me installing links).
I seriously want to help fix this problem, but I don't know what information would be helpful. Please reply and I will give whatever info you require.

Thank you for your attention.

[Marco Rodrigues (gothicx)]

You still have the same issue with the latest updates ?

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

Yup, I sure do. I have found a way to manually fix it. I open the run dialog (alt-f2) and run gnome-terminal. I then run: sudo killall -9 gnome-panel and the panels finally pop up.
Maybe that helps with narrowing down the problem for you :)

Hope this helps.

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

I also found out that I can't run the "run" dialog (alt-f2) unless I first wait for a long while first. I know when when the background image I choose appears.
I have a new machine with components I picked out myself. I have a brand-new computer.

[Marco Rodrigues (gothicx)]

Have you tried to remove .gnome2, .gnome, .gconf, .gconfd directories on your home ? after you need to restart...

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

I tried that but without success I'm afraid. I also took the time from after pressing enter after entering my password until a full gnome desktop was up. It took 3 minutes and 10 seconds. I did that twice with the same result.
I also remembered that I'm using the nvidia blob. I'll remove that, change the driver to the free one (nv) and see if it makes a difference. I could also try to reinstall if the nvidia blob does something naughty.
Thank you for your time :)

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

I tried again after removing the nvidia driver and changing xorg.conf. It took the exact same time. 3 minutes and 10 seconds. Also, this didn't happen in 7.04 (with or without the nvidia driver).
So, what's next? Are there any logs or stuff that I can give you?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you use the desktop effects? Does it happen without them? The bug tracker is about describing issues so they can be fixed, maybe you can try using the support tracker if you are trying to figure what is wrong and then open a bug when you have details

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

Yes, this happens without desktop effects.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you have the issue with an another user on the same configuration? Maybe that's simply your box being slow? What configuration do you use?

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

Yes, I have the same issue when I try to login with a new user. Also, I have previously stated that I have a new machine. My box is not slow ;-/
mb: abit in-9 32x-max (with upgraded bios)
cpu: E6600
ram: 2GB (1066mhz)
GFX: Geforce 8800 gts (640mb)
This also doesn't happen with 7.04 where login is almost instantaneous.
After I get back home from work I will post the xorg.conf and all relevant logs I can think of that might help.

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

Please let me know if anything else could help in solving this.
Also I will post a note here if any update fixes this. I'll also try to reinstall from the next daily iso
and see if this goes away or not.
Thank you for your help.

[Marco Rodrigues (gothicx)]

Why you don't install nvidia drivers ? You're using the old ones.

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_setup_nvidia_drivers_in_7.04

[darx (rabidphage)]

I too have the same issue. Although it doesn't take as long, the time from login to desktop is significantly slower than that of feisty. I'm on gutsy tribe4. My laptop has an ati x300. So mine's not an nvidia issue.

[stefab (bluefuture)]

I too have the same issue but it doesn't take minutes.. it still under 1 minute for session loading. I also don't have an nvidia and i use the default generated xorg.conf file.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

what window manager do you use?

[stefab (bluefuture)]

metacity... i notice that on the first login there is a heavy load of hard disk. If i logout and then i login again the session startup time is normal. So this issue is related to the first login after boot.

[Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson (gnarlin)]

I tried all of that. I have since switched to 7.04 because my holiday was up ;(
Hopefully this will be fixed before 7.10 is released. Sorry I can't be of any more help on this issue, even though I brought it up.
Cheers.

[darx (rabidphage)]

Same problem here. ATI x300. Gutsy. Boots up to the login screen pretty fast. Then hangs around for a minute or two till a usable desktop.

[Christopher Denter (dennda)]

I have a similar issue. Installed Gutsy Tribe 5 on my laptop and then updated it to the latest available version.
It doesn't take minutes but is pretty slow (I didn't take the time but it is significantly slower than it was on feisty, as far as I can tell.).

After I enter my password the mousecursor shows up in front of an empty screen. After some time GNOME starts to load the panels, the launchers (on the panel) and the background.

If you need any information or logs just let me know.

regards

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

Dennda, just out of interest, have you tried booting with ACPI disabled to see if this helps with the speed?

[Vladimir Yatulchik (yatul)]

I also have similar problem on my Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop with Intel integrated video. But it takes more than 10 minutes between entering login credentials and showing gnome panels, if I previously removed .gnome2, .gnome, .gconf, .gconfd.
If I hasn't cleaned up configs than it only shows background and thats all. Alt-F2 doesnt'works, Ctrl-Alt-F1/F6 works fine.
Gutsy fully updated, network-manager was removed (works incorrectly with my WiFi).
Disabling ACPI doesn't help.

[Vladimir Yatulchik (yatul)]

Actually I solved problem. My loopback network interface was misconfigured.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Does anybody still have an issue?

[Christopher Denter (dennda)]

Yes, me
It's still the same with latest updates & latest kernel.

@ Ashley: Yes I tried that. It didn't help at all.

Any other hints / questions?

regards

[Jonathan Strander (mblackwell1024)]

I noticed this as well with everything up to date. Login time has to be roughly 30 seconds to 1 minute. Sometimes the background image refuses to load if I've done a logout and login as well (unless I open the Appearances GUI).

[Christopher Denter (dennda)]

Just as a side note: Everything's ok with XFCE.
(Dunno if this is of any help. Just to make sure.)

regards

[Nic (ntetreau)]

Mine is not as bad but about a minute to lod the gnome desktop. I have a core2duo and nvidia. I' ll try all the possible solutions listed here and report back.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Shouldn't strace make it possible to see what's going on?

[Jonathan Strander (mblackwell1024)]

Possibly, but what should be straced exactly?

[mysticmatrix (mishra-anurag07)]

I also confirm this problem under Metacity(I have G965, blacklisted at compiz :( ). It occurs even after turning tracker off.
Here's a small sicussion at ubuntuforums
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=563530

[Henrik Binggl (henrik-binggl)]

Anotherone: Same result for me. Not 3 minutes but it is slower compared to feisty.
I did a fresh beta install. Happens if 3D-effects are enabled or disabled.

Linux aragorn 2.6.22-12-generic #1 SMP Sun Sep 23 20:03:18 GMT 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

If anybody has time to debug this thing, have a look here:

http://www.gnome.org/~lcolitti/gnome-startup/analysis/

[Gunny (richard-gunn)]

same issue here , slow to load full dekstop. Also notice a long delay when hitting the power/logout button. If I I restart GDM from console it loads very quickly. This behaviour is the same with or without Compiz

[cokelly (okelly-ciaran)]

Not much to add but: me too. Just over one minute after login. All suggestions here don't do the trick. I've already tried disabling various services one by one but to no avail. Of course, as bugs go it's an irritation rather than a catastrophe.

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

same problem here as well, running latest Gutsy Beta as of 10/6/07 with all updates:
Gnome takes a minute to load on my P4 3.0 ghz 768 meg ram, effects off and nothing else running, default install. Nothing swapping, ram is fine, feisty loaded gnome up instantly after password screen, now 60+ seconds is a bit too much...

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

I have filed a bug upstream:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=484358

[Christopher Denter (dennda)]

As Christoffer suggested I created these bootcharts:
http://www.the-space-station.com/~dennda/gallery/bootchart/gutsy-20071008-1.png
http://www.the-space-station.com/~dennda/gallery/bootchart/gutsy-20071008-2.png

I hope they are of any help for you.
The login really is much too slow.

regards

[Brandon Snider (brandonsnider)]

There are two things added to the gnome panel that weren't there in previous distros. One is the "User Switcher" and the other is the "Deskbar". They are side by side. One or both of them is causing this problem. When I removed them both, Gnome loaded in a few seconds, as expected.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

@dennda: you have to patch bootchart to profile the login. Otherwise you'll get the boot process.

@Brandon: they are not the problem. You have to remove them, reboot and then login to get a accurate measurement.
There is a regression even when not having the deskbar and user switch on the panel.

[bonsiware (bonsiware-deactivatedaccount)]

I removed "User switcher" after installation and "Deskbar" just now, rebooted, but the problem is still there...

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

same problem here, i have everything disabled on bootup and it still
takes forever to load compared to feisty

[Brandon Snider (brandonsnider)]

After removing Deskbar and User Switcher, it is faster for me than it used to be. IT is still not fast enough, but when I do a ctrl+alt+bkspc and then login again, it takes about 10 seconds. So it may have little to do with Gnome itself. I still think those two items or whatever they're a frontend for is the problem.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Deskbar is really slow to load, I guess it has to do with python being slow.

Logging in again is fast maybe caused by caching.

Logging in twice in edgy is really fast also (about 7 seconds here).

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Repeat after me:
I must reboot between each tries. I must reboot between each tries. I must reboot between each tries.

Otherwise your numbers mean NOTHING, the data is still in your computer RAM.

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

for me gnome is slow and I have 4 gig of ram and a dual 3ghz
processor, feisty on my p4 3 ghz 768 meg ram loads 20 secs faster,
explain that.

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

disabling everything unneeded on boot, including bluetooth and printer
svc only saves like 2-3 secs if that... the fact is Ubuntu Gutsy is
much slower on boot up

[yop (yop)]

Well I can confirm this slowness for the desktop to show up, with or without desktop effects.
uptodate: Oct 11-07.
Dell D610, 1.6Mhz, 1024RAM, 915 Graphic.

Also need to click on the gnome-panel or the desktop to make the panel show up.

Or here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=571848

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

same here the panel does not apear until a click on desktop, gnome still slow

[Lucazade (lucazade)]

now the panel (the bottom one) appears immmediately, thanks to latest updates...
gnome here it's still slower than the feisty one. btw not a great issue for me!

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

same w/me panel is now working correctly, thank you for the updates!
Kyle Weller

[Jean Levasseur (levasseur.jean)]

I got the same issue. Althought, I got once the session loaded and then with the system monitor, I could see that nautilus was taking 99% of CPU.

@ yatul: let's try this out. Anyone else has tried it? I'll get into it tonight when I'll get back home and give you guys comments on it.

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

it seems the live cd has the same issue x10 since it loads off a live cd, i
got 1 gig of ram and a 24x drive and feisty live cd loaded in seconds, now
it takes 5 min for gnome to load, it takes a full minute after reboot then
login to load up gnome in gutsy when feisty took 20 secs....

[coffeemug (coffeemug)]

Happens to me too on 7.10 final, with or without desktop effects. It takes about 30-40 seconds to login. This was not the case in Feisty. Starting the very first application is also significantly slower than used to be. Everything after that is fast, as usual.

[yop (yop)]

Yep I did a clean install of 7.10,. And it's still slow like....

On 10/20/07, coffeemug <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> Happens to me too on 7.10 final, with or without desktop effects. It
> takes about 30-40 seconds to login. This was not the case in Feisty.
> Starting the very first application is also significantly slower than
> used to be. Everything after that is fast, as usual.
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

no need to keep adding comment to say it's also slower on your box, that has been confirmed as happening to several people and you only mail spam the person subscribed to the bug with new comments, what would be useful would be somebody having the issue actually looking at what creating the bug

[NoWhereMan (e.vacchi) (uncommonnonsense)]

I have found the origin of the problem for me; with feisty I had to boot using

      acpi=force irqpoll

as I had suggested for instance in bug #58117

Now, the parameters to make everything work are

      acpi=force pnpbios=off

irqpoll slows everything down, starting from the kernel itself (very slow boot time)

[NoWhereMan (e.vacchi) (uncommonnonsense)]

correction: this has made my USBs not working anymore... that's why I was using irqpoll, unfortunately irqpoll is *unbearable* now

[Kyran Lange (kyranl)]

I had this problem, it was caused by my firewall blocking loopback traffic after i configured firehol (the firewall builder i use) poorly.
After i fixed this and allowed all loopback traffic, gnome loaded properly again.

I tested to see if this was the problem by pinging 127.0.0.1 and seeing that it wasn't working.

hope this helps.

[Brandon Snider (brandonsnider)]

Here's what finally fixed it for me. I completely removed both KDE and Gnome. Then, I used aptitude to reinstall them. This page explains how to do this:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/puregnome
and:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/purekde

Once Gnome and KDE are gone, and their config files purged (use the -purge switch), you can reinstall them by:
# apt-get install ubuntu-desktop kubuntu-desktop OR:
# aptitude install ubuntu-desktop kubuntu-desktop

After I did this, the desktop began loading normally. It should take a few hours depending on your internet and PC speed. Of course, this doesn't pinpoint exactly what the problem was, but it does fix it. I suspect it was a problem caused by improperly upgrading from Feisty.

[NoWhereMan (e.vacchi) (uncommonnonsense)]

@brandon: had you tried to first just delete your .kde, .gnome2, .gconf, .gconfd (etc...) dirs, first? To test, I created a new user just to see, my problem for istance didn't come from that

[Brandon Snider (brandonsnider)]

Yes, I had tried that. It didn't change things. This was a problem that wasn't related to the user's home directory.

[dcherryholmes (david-cherryholmes)]

I attempted the fix proposed by Brandon Snider and it did not work for me. I also created a new user with default .gnome configs and login was still very slow. Since I use a laptop, with an ATI card, and suspend is broken with both the radeon and fglrx driver, this is a pretty serious regression, at least for those of us that are affected by it.

[James Allen (azexian)]

Same problem here, but also when trying to logout, it takes a long time for anything to come up, I considered if this was something to do with networking, as I strangely find I have to bring down both my Ethernet interfaces in order to connect my wireless, I would prefer not to reinstall gnome, as this would a nasty download, although I will use it as a last resort, my system is fully upgraded, and before gutsy it run fast and efficiently.

I'm going to search through my logs for anything relevant now, may i suggest that this be moved up to medium importance, as it seems to effect many people, and is a nasty issue.

[Austin Jones (austinbaysjones)]

It looks like many people had trouble with this, and a common cause is a misconfigured /etc/network/interfaces. There is a thread here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=179745), and a fix here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=180447). In the forum thread they mention checking ~/.xsession-errors for other errors, and this worked for me (I had a few invalid lines in my ~/.Xmodmap file).
Just for convenience you can use 'ifconfig -a | grep -A4 ^lo' in terminal to check whether your loopback network interface is running, or use the Network Monitor applet in your systray.

[Mitch Wiedemann (mitch-ithacafreesoftware)]

I was seeing very slow Gnome load times as well.

After reading a "misconfigured loopback" comment above, I checked my network interface settings, and sure enough, I had configured a static IP address for my ethernet interface and the slow startup would happen only when I didn't have the ethernet cable plugged in.

I mostly use my wireless interface, so I set the ethernet interface back to "roaming" and the problem was solved for me.

So, I suspect the long load times are due to a network-manager timeout or something like that.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Definitely something is wrong.

Like I wrote in the upstream report, loading gnome 2.20 in Arch Linux takes 20-21 seconds.

It seems that the startup daemons / stuff is more or less the same.

People with more time than me and/or interest can dig out the differences.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you consider the arch linux slow? Do you use deskbar applet there? The login takes less than that on my Ubuntu installation

[David (dcantin)]

Same here, when I try to logout on a old p3 500mhs with 384 mb of ram with 7.10, it took some minutes to show the logout panel on the screen.

One interesting thing : If, after getting the logout panel, I click cancel and try again, there is no delay and a got two more option "Hibernate" and "Suspend" witch weren't there the first time

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

david u might want to try xubuntu, its faaaaaaast

On 11/1/07, David <dcantin@*.com> wrote:
>
> Same here, when I try to logout on a old p3 500mhs with 384 mb of ram
> with 7.10, it took some minutes to show the logout panel on the screen.
>
> One interesting thing : If, after getting the logout panel, I click
> cancel and try again, there is no delay and a got two more option
> "Hibernate" and "Suspend" witch weren't there the first time
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

@Sebastian:

I consider Arch fast since it takes 20 seconds to load Gnome using that. It takes 37 seconds using Ubuntu, so something is slowing Ubuntu down.

No, I'm not using deskbar, it is simply too slow to load.

Also, it does not make sense to compare your load times with mine, since I'm using an old laptop.

I'm wondering why the importance is set to Low, when this affects a lot users everyday.

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

I agree, the importance on allot of bugs are not appropriate and do not get
enough attention as they should, there is bugs that have not ever been fixed
in Ubuntu when other distro's fixed the issues a long time ago...

On 11/4/07, Christoffer Sørensen <ubuntu@*.dk> wrote:
>
> @Sebastian:
>
> I consider Arch fast since it takes 20 seconds to load Gnome using that.
> It takes 37 seconds using Ubuntu, so something is slowing Ubuntu down.
>
> No, I'm not using deskbar, it is simply too slow to load.
>
> Also, it does not make sense to compare your load times with mine, since
> I'm using an old laptop.
>
> I'm wondering why the importance is set to Low, when this affects a lot
> users everyday.
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[James Allen (azexian)]

David - Same here with the logout, how odd that the options don't appear until after its already been opened once.
Kyle, would you care to list a few bugs which are fixed on other distro's but not ubuntu?

[James Allen (azexian)]

I think i might have the reason for the problem here; I noticed in my .xsession-errors file had a number of errors in it, this for example:

(process:5921): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead.

Was when I was logging in, and this was coursing the slow down, I also noticed this:

** (x-session-manager:5918): WARNING **: Couldn't connect to PowerManager Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

When I try and logout, the last message does mention network connections, but I don't know how they're linked, as my loopback is fine (following previous posts, I checked it was up before logging on) and all but my wireless in disabled, any ideas? .xsession-errors log attached

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The settings will not make the bug fixed much faster, there is ten of thousand of bugs open and somebody getting the issue should work on this one. The bug get fixed upstream usually and not in a distribution specific way usually and that's likely to be a GNOME issue or due to the user configuration

[James Allen (azexian)]

Sebastian - I think this is very much to do with the users configuration, and not simply down to gnome, as I find that this issue does not exist on my laptop, which was updated on the same day as my computer, and they both have the same updates installed, so it can't simply be gnome, or they would both have it. My laptop tends to be simply for light browsing however, so there aren't many additionally programs installed (to the default configuration).

Below is the specs of both computers as we might be able to put it down to a certain piece of hardware, I am suspicious of wireless, as others have listed this, although it could just as easily be a graphics issue, it would be helpful if people could list there hardware here so we can compare and try and find out the issue in that way, please include graphics card and processor (I see it as unlikely, that everyone on this forum will have the same motherboard features, so I doubt that will make any difference)

Laptop (unaffected by bug)

Dell Latitude D510 - Intel 1915 graphics card (using the i810 driver) with an intel processor in built intel wireless (ipw2200 driver used)

Computer (effected by bug)

Amd Athlon 3000+ processor Nvidia fx 5500 graphics card (using nvidia's driver) nasty belkin F5D705D (using rt73 cvs 2007100108 driver)

This is, of course, the easy answer, and I doubt that you're all going to reply saying you have the exact same driver for something, but, its always good to try the easy answer's first...

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

i too have a somewhat slow bootup time; nothing to the severity of many minutes, but still, a significant increase when compared to feisty.

i am running a IBM T43 laptop, and also gutsy is installed on a DELL INSPIRON B130. same problem with both.

one thing i do notice after looking @ ps output and also xsession-errors, is that my first error occurs JUST after gnome-panel loads for the first time (excluding a setuid error thru gtk+ that seems to arise from dbus?). on my laptop specifically (T43)---right after i log in---the top and bottom gnome-panels load very quickly (no BG image yet), just like feisty. however, before they are populated with any icons, the screen/mouse flickers and the panels disappear. this is when i experience about 10-20 seconds of heavy disk i/o time as others have described.

the interesting part about all that is the fact that nautilus is the very first thing that is loaded after the panels. others have claimed no problems when using xcfe or kde, so this (nautilus) seems to be contributing somehow? also, i have since read about similar issues regarding nautilus and gutsy specifically that did not exist in feisty.

until then.

[yop (yop)]

Ok I have disabled all boot script that I did not need, I kept only the system boot script just to test.
Those script did I disable. And it was still slow
Dell D610 Intel i915

acpid
 hostname.sh
 rc.local
acpi-support
hotkey-setup
alsa-utils
 readahead
anacron
readahead-desktop
apmd
 keyboard-setup
apparmor
apport
klogd
rmnologin
atd
 laptop-mode
 rsync
avahi-daemon
libpam-foreground
bluetooth
loopback
bootclean
 makedev
 skeleton
smartmontools
sysklogd
cron
cupsys
 networking
dhcdbd
nvidia-kernel
dns-clean
pcmciautils
usplash
powernowd
 vbesave
powernowd.early
 waitnfs.sh
 pppd-dns
 wpa-ifupdown
hdparm
 rc

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

ok.

nice little bootchart program, wouldve been nice if i could have done this a little easier tho...

anyways i modified the running parameters of the bootchart program so it would not stop running when it gdm/init.d was processed, that way we could get a look at what all was happening on my T43 during the 15+sec freeze period. i recorded 85 sec. of time, approximately 65 beyond the point where gdm is initialized. like i said before, blank gnome-panels will come up after about 3-4 seconds (@36sec), then disappear almost IMMEDIATELY (notice how nautilus is initialized RIGHT after the panels in the chart). the heavy disk i/o seems to correlate VERY nicely with nautilus activity(until 51sec). Although the gap also matches well with dhcdbd activity--
--i tried a little fix someone posted about automatically setting resolv.conf to 0.0.0.0 to avoid dns issues...no change.

am i waiting on my wireless card, before loading background/panel apps/etc. in this situation?

im trying to gather info from the chart but its somewhat cryptic to my novice eyes but i hope it will be of some use.

here is a link in case my attachment doesnt work:
http://sweetsinsemilla.googlepages.com/gutsy-20071113-1.png

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

forgot to add one little thing...soo tired...

i tried disabling gnome-at-visual (in session preferences {assistive technology/AT}) because the chart showed a strange 2 seconds of zombie time after login... but this did not do anything. also i seem to have misinterpreted the chart referring to nautilus...the pink areas are where nautilus seems to be WAITING due to high disk i/o. the culprit here seems to be some kind of change in the networking arena from feisty to gutsy...be somewheres in nm-applet/dhcdbd/NetworkManager.

figure it out party ppl.

[yop (yop)]

I have even uninstalled the NManager and also blacklisted my wifi card to no
avail

On Nov 13, 2007 2:28 PM, sweetsinse <email address hidden> wrote:

> forgot to add one little thing...soo tired...
>
> i tried disabling gnome-at-visual (in session preferences {assistive
> technology/AT}) because the chart showed a strange 2 seconds of zombie
> time after login... but this did not do anything. also i seem to have
> misinterpreted the chart referring to nautilus...the pink areas are
> where nautilus seems to be WAITING due to high disk i/o. the culprit
> here seems to be some kind of change in the networking arena from feisty
> to gutsy...be somewheres in nm-applet/dhcdbd/NetworkManager.
>
> figure it out party ppl.
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Here is a strace of nautilus while starting up.

I started strace manually after logging in in gdm, so it may not be totally complete.

Anyway, it seems there are lot of files that nautilus is opening but are not there. This includes locale stuff and icons.

I'm not sure if this is causing the slow down. Definitely it does not make it faster.

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

ok.

i have been restarting my computer all day testing different configurations and looking at many, many...many post-gdm bootcharts... in fact i triggered 2 'force checks' on my laptop so i rebooted at least 60 times haha

anyway, i have a few interesting things to report. i am running Gutsy final with all updates as of 10 minutes ago.

before i say anything about compiz/etc., i wanted to ask/point out a few things.

first, while looking into this problem i noticed others having their gui desktop completely freeze after enabling/disabling certain startup apps and then attempting to press the logout button; additionally, some experienced this after mysterious errors earlier in the day but did not notice a problem until they tried to log out. i encountered this very thing when attempting to barebone my session down to essentials and pinpoint this 'slow' boot reason. i disabled all plugins to compiz using CCSM, except 'dbus' and 'workarounds'--additionally i disabled ALL startup options in Preferences>Sessions (i will brief upon another possible bug regarding this in a moment). under this config i still got a brief moment (always>2sec) of gnome-panels before everything goes black for 15-20 seconds. HOWEVER, when i tried to reboot using the logout button, my computer locked up. the source of the problem was due to 'Power Manager' being disabled in Preferences>Sessions. my guess is the logout button is trying to query said program to try and determine if 'hibernate' or 'suspend' should be an available option on the logout screen. this bug is reproducible simply by disabling 'Power Manager' under Preferences>Sessions, rebooting, and attempting to log out using the gui button.

second, even though i had disabled ALL startup apps except 'Power Manager' , bootcharts would sometimes show these apps initiating. this may have been because i hard reset my laptop the time before because of the logout bug i described above. also i could not figure out how to disable the deskbar applet at all, but i am confident this has nothing to do with our issues.

third, not related but someone might want to file a bug rep. in the appropriate place, nm-applet will occasionally place the 'Wireless key needed' dialog on the desktop of another user logged in, instead of the current user. i was logged in as a regular/desktop user and the dialog appeared on the poweruser that was logged in. i had to switch users to enter the WEP key.

fourth, i noticed this EVERY time in compiz and only once with metacity; xsession will try and initialize gnome-volume-manager and gnome-power-manager only to by terminated within less than a second and reinitialized by either init or getty. bootchart:
http://sweetsinsemilla.googlepages.com/compizdbus-workarounds-pwrMAN-slow_a.png
which leads to my final ?'ion.....

fifth, why do some bootcharts show init starting many gnome-* apps, and other show getty? i viewed subsequent charts and there appeared to be no reason for the swapping...not sure the repercussions of this. lastly, gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-vfs-daemon will sometimes be initialized by dbus-daemon, other times by getty, and still others by init... does this ...

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

2007/11/15, sweetsinse <email address hidden>:

> sorry for the lengthy post; i want to solve this ;)

No, be proud, not sorry. Thank you very much for doing all this empiric
measuring and testing, you are doing something I that I pretty much gave up
doing (because I lack knowledge and time). You have all my cheers behind you
to keep going! :) I would be so happy one day to have the Promised 3 Seconds
Login Time[1] (I cannot, no matter what I do, go under 30 seconds).

[1]: http://live.gnome.org/GnomePerformance/LoginTime

[James Allen (azexian)]

Nice job sweetsinse, I also found that the logout was all down to the power management applet, simply making sure it starts and also adding it as a tray icon fixes this issue, one down! I still think the login is very much a network driver issue, as I *DO NOT* experience this issue at all on my laptop which has all the newest updates also.

[err_ok (jack-regnart)]

The reason i was having this problem was that i have the git version of compiz installed in the wrong location '/usr/local/bin/compiz' all i had to do was make a symlink to '/usr/bin/compiz' and boot time was sorted!

Just thought i'd put that out there incase anyone was having similar issues. Thank you to whomever suggested checking the xsession-errors file!

[Mathieu Laurent (mla)]

Hello,

I have this problem since 2 weeks. The Gnome startup is very slow, its seems not responding several seconds. I use ubuntu gnome on my laptop since 2 years, and I didn't have a problem like this. It's not due to profile switcher, deskbar or compiz because I already used it before.

Sébastien you tell that the average start duration is 30 seconds, I'm agree with you. But since 2 weeks, this time is multiply by 3, so the duration is between 90 or 120 seconds after the first authentication in gdm.

I enable the gnome splash screen to look where the system seems not responding. I wait 30 seconds (with only the ubuntu default background and the welcome sound) before the display of splash. After that, the splash is hidden and I wait 30 seconds (with again only the ubuntu default background, always no gnome-panel). After all Gnome applications runs quickly like before.

If I signout, and I auth again, I have no time out. The gnome startup is quick. The problem is only after the first auth after the boot.

I try with other new user on the system, and I have the same problem.

How can I help you ?

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

A duplicate of Bug #151544?

[Christopher Denter (dennda)]

So, adding $my_hostname to /etc/hosts didn't work. It's as slow as before. (Remember you must restart to test the difference. Session-re-login doesn't help there.)

.Xsession-errors hasn't brought anything to light either.

So, what further information could I provide to help get this fixed for hardy?
I notice all of my mates have the same issue...

regards

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

i just installed hardy alpha 1...problem persists in the same way. again gnome panels appear right away just like feisty, only to be near immediately killed, then reappear 10+ seconds later. occurs in the same way as gutsy, but maybe to be expected since this is only alpha 1.

i will be reverting to virgin feisty install until hardy final.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

downgrading the version is not likely going to make the new version be quicker

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

I have tried to strace gnome-session as stated in http://live.gnome.org/GnomePerformance/LoginTime

The session died quickly, so this approach didn't wok.

I added a new session type in /usr/share/xsessions/ and replaced 'gnome-session' with 'strace -ttt -f -o /tmp/login.strace /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session'

This works fine but strace keeps running even after login. If you kill strace, then you'll get logged out and have a nice log file in /tmp/login.strace

[shz (afer)]

I have found this link in the compiz fusion forum that seems to speak about the same problem:

http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=337&highlight=login+slow

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

shz, I tried disabling my nvidia driver, using the "nv" one instead, therefore disabling the hardware support, so compiz doesn't loads during GNOME startup... but GNOME takes the same time to load, then (~34 secs).

[Mike Mackintosh (mike-mackintosh)]

For me, if i disable the nvidia driver, gnome does not slow on boot. Only when the driver is initialized, do i experience problems.

[Mathieu Laurent (mla)]

I didn't use nvidia and I have this problem.

seb128, do you know how we can help you to solve this bug ?

2007/12/3, #Reistlehr- <email address hidden>:
>
> For me, if i disable the nvidia driver, gnome does not slow on boot.
> Only when the driver is initialized, do i experience problems.
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> seb128, do you know how we can help you to solve this bug ?

try to figure why it's slow for you, maybe remove applets, don't use the desktop effects and note if that's quicker

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

I tried removing applets, removing desktop icons, disabling nvidia driver, disabling desktop effects... but I only got 3-4 secs of difference...

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

I forgot it: I tried removing restricted-drivers-manager, tracker daemon & bluetooth manager from GNOME startup, without luck.

[Frank McCormick (fmccormick)]

Same problem here...but take a look xt my xsessions errors file. Interesting.

[Zer0 (zero-nedlinux)]

I just want to say i have fixed !!

What i did ?

I have disabled the whole UBUNTU & replaced for a working fine by default linux distro.. Mandriva 2008.

Im out of this bug repport

[spanella (spanella)]

thats one way to do it....maybe devs will realize how annoying this can be.

this bug needs instructions on how to approach self-diagnosing the problem. many people have removed all applets with no results. sweetsinse seemed to do an extremely thorough job and suggested it may be a problem with the compiz script used by ubuntu. has this been explored by any developers knowledgable in this area?

looking at bootchart doesn't mean anything to me, if i go through the trouble of patching and installing it to analyze login will someone take a look? first though, how do i do that?

I for one use both compiz and deskbar as i have since edgy, and i've still noticed a good 15-30sec jump in login time since moving from feisty. removing them doesnt seem to change much, but when you're talking about 45sec login vs 60sec its still waaayyyy too loooong.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue is not to realize how annoying the bug can be, it's to get useful datas on what is creating the slowness. The code used is mostly the upstream one and the issue is likely to happen on other distribution using GNOME 2.20, switching distribution is not going to fix anything and let to an another set of issues

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

1. Has anybody tried downgrading the kernel version, using the Feisty kernel in Gutsy? Is there any difference in the startup time?
2. Has anybody tried another distribution that uses GNOME 2.20, as Ubuntu Gutsy does? Is there any difference in the startup time?

[spanella (spanella)]

to the contrary, YES, switching to other distros also running Gnome 2.20 has made a big difference to some of the users above. I believe one person tried Arch linux with more panel aplets and still had 10sec less than Ubuntu. Then as you saw, anibal switched to Mandriva and seems to not have the problem anymore. So to both Sebastien and Ricardo, YES it does make a difference. this is an Ubuntu specific problem, How do I help?

have not tried the feisty kernel, but do not have the time right now to test that

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Those user comments are not clear. Are mandriva users running GNOME? Do they have compiz fusion activated or not? Does it make a difference to not run it on Ubuntu? Did they use the same user configuration?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Trying to look at the KDE startup speed difference could also be useful, maybe the issue is not a GNOME one

[vwingate (launchpad-vwingate)]

I have switched to KDE from Gnome because Gnome was taking too long to start up, and this did fix the problem for me. So I think it is a problem related to Gnome. In either case Compiz didn't make a difference.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Since the gnome-session starts gnome processes, how can it not be related to gnome?

I have used Arch Linux with the 2.6.22 kernel and it logged in in 20 seconds, about 10 seconds less than edgy and even less than gutsy.

Removing compiz in ubuntu does not make a difference.

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

Christoffer, what time takes GNOME in your gutsy to load fully?

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

On average it took 38 seconds using the beta (trackerd disabled, no deskbar applet).

However, with the latest updates it takes about 50 seconds.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you consider that edgy already had the issue then and that's not something gutsy specific there?

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

I don't know if edgy already had the issue, but feisty is considerably faster than gutsy, and I think the issue is about the regression from feisty to gutsy.

Maybe feisty is abnormally fast comparing with edgy & gutsy?

[spanella (spanella)]

i agree, do remember a good drop in time with feisty as well, which would make this a regression more than anything. not as comparable to edgy

[bereanone (bereanone)]

I had feisty installed on my HP Pavillion Laptop, and migrated to Gutsy, everything worked o.k., then Gutsy completely crashed and I had to reinstall from scratch after formatting my partition, (I duel boot). Now it takes a loooooong time to boot, 3-4 minutes at least, muuuch slower at any rate. All the techno jargon from this site is lost on me, I am too new to Ubuntu. If someone can help great, but it will have to be spelled out. Thanx.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is a duplicate comment suggesting that network-manager is creating the issue, could whoever has the issue try if uninstalling it makes a difference there?

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Holy COW! That guy nailed it! As much as I *love* network manager, I never *suspected* it at all.

Here are my benchmarks on my desktop computer. It uses a DHCP wired network interface.
==== with network-manager =====
splash start to login ready: 32.48 seconds
login to fully loaded*: 51.07 seconds

==== without network-manager, no network interface configured ====
splash start to login ready: 31.30 seconds (not significative)
login to fully loaded*: 34.44 seconds!

==== without network-manager, DHCP interface configured manually ====
splash start to login ready: 32 seconds (not significative)
login to fully loaded*: 34 seconds!

*: no hdd scratching and all panel applets loaded
There needs to be some serious profiling done here.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Oh yeah and I forgot to mention that of course all these tests were done ~empirically (cold boot, one thing changed at a time). The second "34 seconds!" time is, of course, not significative compared to "no network interace configured".

Furthermore, removing compiz + awn reduces the login time by 5 additional seconds (much less than I thought; I thought it would chop off 15 seconds).

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

Sorry, but the fix didn't work for me. I tried removing network-manager & network-manager-gnome, but GNOME takes the same time to load fully... :(

[Christopher Denter (dennda)]

I am not perfectly sure that it is network-managers fault either.
I properly removed it but the difference wasn't that huge.
I still need to check that on other systems, though.

Isn't there any proper way to tell which process takes how long during login?
If that was possible we could easily find out what is making this huge difference (that needs to be fixed as far as I am concerned).

Any hints on that?

regards

[Raymond Yip (raymoyip)]

Actually I am having the same problem too...
From GDM login until my desktop is fully loaded, i takes about 40 seconds.
I spent whole day trying to find out the problem (including following the
instructions in the bug report) but none work for me...

Jeff, 34 seconds is still considered a long login time in my opinion, edgy
loaded much faster than this. Actually, my desktop with gusty loaded much
faster than my laptop.

On Dec 8, 2007 10:40 PM, dennda <email address hidden> wrote:

> I am not perfectly sure that it is network-managers fault either.
> I properly removed it but the difference wasn't that huge.
> I still need to check that on other systems, though.
>
> Isn't there any proper way to tell which process takes how long during
> login?
> If that was possible we could easily find out what is making this huge
> difference (that needs to be fixed as far as I am concerned).
>
> Any hints on that?
>
> regards
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Mathieu Laurent (mla)]

Perhaps dependent of this bug ?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/78263

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Mathieu Laurent:

My laptop is connected to the same network all the time, so that bug is the cause of this bug.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

correction: *not* the cause of this bug.

@Seb: even though edgy login is slower than Arch, it is difficult to compare when it was another kernel, gnome version etc.

Gutsy definitely has a regression.

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

Removing networkmanager didn't work for me.

Still 50 second login.

[boulderjams (joshuaschatz)]

I am still having the same problem as everyone else. I cannot pin point this problem to compiz, network-manager or awn. I don't have many gnome applets running either. Here is a copy of my .xession-errors.

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

I have this problem too, but not just with GNOME. In GNOME, the panels don't load sometimes and alt+f2 doesn't work. I use Compiz so if I hit super+t to get a terminal, the GTK parts of the terminal never load (and then it goes black because it's non-responsive and Compiz knows it). If I then log out and login with Enlightenment, Enlightenment also fails to work right. Starting anything in Enlightenment, I get the top bar of the window glowing red, which is equivalent to Compiz dimming non-responsive apps. I have to reboot to get a GDM session that will let me login to anything and actually works.

[pepito (iorga1)]

Hi guys
Hi Sebastien

Just for info:
I m using gentoo.

 $ sudo emerge --info
Portage 2.1.3.19 (default-linux/x86/2007.0/desktop, gcc-4.1.2, glibc-2.6.1-r0, 2.6.22-gentoo-r2 i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.22-gentoo-r2 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
Timestamp of tree: Sun, 09 Dec 2007 10:30:01 +0000
ccache version 2.4 [enabled]
app-shells/bash: 3.2_p17
dev-java/java-config: 1.3.7, 2.0.33-r1
dev-lang/python: 2.4.4-r6
dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r6
dev-util/ccache: 2.4-r7
sys-apps/baselayout: 1.12.9-r2
sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.18.1-r2
sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.61-r1
sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2, 1.10
sys-devel/binutils: 2.18-r1
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.16
sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.24
virtual/os-headers: 2.6.22-r2
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium4 -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/share/X11/xkb"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/gconf /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/splash /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/web2c /etc/udev/rules.d"
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium4 -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoaddcvs buildsyspkg ccache cvs distcc distlocks loadpolicy metadata-transfer sandbox sfperms strict unmerge-orphans userfetch userpriv usersandbox"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://distfiles.gentoo.org http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats --timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages --filter=H_**/files/digest-*"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/portage/local/layman/sunrise /usr/portage/local/layman/science /usr/portage/local/layman/lila-theme /usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="X a52 aac acl acpi alsa amr avahi avi beagle berkdb bitmap-fonts cairo cdr cli cracklib crypt cups dbus div4linux djvu dlloader dri dvb dvd dvdr dvdread dvi eds emboss encode esd evo exif fam ffmpeg firefox fortran gdbm gif glitz gnome gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 hal hald howl iconv imagemagick imap ipv6 isdnlog java joystick jpeg kerberos ldap mad matroska midi mikmod mjpeg mmx mono mp3 mpeg mudflap nautilus ncurses nls nptl nptlonly nsplugin nvtv ogg opengl openmp oss pam pcre pdf perl png pppd python qt qt3 qt3support qt4 quicktime readline reflection sdl session spell spl sse sse2 ssl svg tcpd tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts unicode userlocales v4l v4l2 vorbis win32codecs x86 xine xinerama xml xorg xv zlib" ALSA_CARDS="ali5451 als4000 atiixp atiixp-modem bt87x ca0106 cmipci emu10k1 emu10k1x ens1370 ens1371 es1938 es1968 fm801 hda-intel intel8x0 intel8x0m maestro3 trident usb-audio via82xx via82xx-modem ymfpci" ALSA_PCM_PLUGINS="adpcm alaw asym copy dmix dshare dsnoop empty extplug file hooks iec958 ioplug ladspa lfloat linear meter mulaw multi null plug rate route share shm softvol" APACHE2_MODULES="actions alias auth_basic authn_alias authn_anon authn_dbm authn_default authn_fi...

[pepito (iorga1)]

EDIT TO MY POST:

I was wrong:

gnome was not 15 secs, but 35 secs as many of you.
I updated the config, removed an env variable that was dodgy and also edited /usr/bin/compiz-start and removed in it the gconf option as it was telling me this was already set up.
Then I added to my gnome session this /usr/bin/compiz-start and removed all other emerald/ compiz things from the Session menu.
Logged out
Login in 2 secs!!!!!

So the problem is in gconf I dare say... try to have a look
it seems that it is loaded twice?

Another thing I can t sort out:
a ps -ux tells me i m running the gtk-window-decorator --replace
i don t want this one to be used, but my emerald theme.

From a terminal, if i type emerald --replace, everything is just fine, perfect, as I want it to be.
But I can t add this in the Session Menu: it just not works, as if it were not there.
Any idea?

Many thanks! Hope I have helped somehow!

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

/usr/bin/compiz-start? That file doesn't exist for me. I'm not using gconf
bindings for my compiz either--I'm using ccsm's settings, so my compiz line
in ps -aef is
compiz.real --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints ccp
--indirect-rendering

On Dec 18, 2007 11:28 AM, pepito <email address hidden> wrote:

> EDIT TO MY POST:
>
> I was wrong:
>
> gnome was not 15 secs, but 35 secs as many of you.
> I updated the config, removed an env variable that was dodgy and also
> edited /usr/bin/compiz-start and removed in it the gconf option as it was
> telling me this was already set up.
> Then I added to my gnome session this /usr/bin/compiz-start and removed
> all other emerald/ compiz things from the Session menu.
> Logged out
> Login in 2 secs!!!!!
>
> So the problem is in gconf I dare say... try to have a look
> it seems that it is loaded twice?
>
>
> Another thing I can t sort out:
> a ps -ux tells me i m running the gtk-window-decorator --replace
> i don t want this one to be used, but my emerald theme.
>
> >From a terminal, if i type emerald --replace, everything is just fine,
> perfect, as I want it to be.
> But I can t add this in the Session Menu: it just not works, as if it were
> not there.
> Any idea?
>
>
> Many thanks! Hope I have helped somehow!
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
apt-get moo

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

@pepito

Measure the login time after a doing a reboot first.

This has been mentioned a number of times in this thread.

[shz (afer)]

pepito,

In my PC there is a /usr/bin/compiz script (not compiz.start).

The only thing about gconf in the script is:

# load the ccp plugin if present and fallback to plain gconf if not
if [ -f ${PLUGIN_PATH}libccp.so ]; then
 COMPIZ_PLUGINS="$COMPIZ_PLUGINS ccp"
elif [ -f ${PLUGIN_PATH}libgconf.so ]; then
 COMPIZ_PLUGINS="$COMPIZ_PLUGINS glib gconf"
fi

Do I have to comment out this block?

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

That's what I have too, but I think if you comment out the part where it
picks between ccp and gconf, and you use ccp, then you don't get any of the
advanced configuration stuff. Actually, if you don't let either load, it'd
probably just freak out and not load because it wouldn't have any settings.

On Dec 19, 2007 4:34 AM, shz <email address hidden> wrote:

> pepito,
>
> In my PC there is a /usr/bin/compiz script (not compiz.start).
>
> The only thing about gconf in the script is:
>
> # load the ccp plugin if present and fallback to plain gconf if not
> if [ -f ${PLUGIN_PATH}libccp.so ]; then
> COMPIZ_PLUGINS="$COMPIZ_PLUGINS ccp"
> elif [ -f ${PLUGIN_PATH}libgconf.so ]; then
> COMPIZ_PLUGINS="$COMPIZ_PLUGINS glib gconf"
> fi
>
> Do I have to comment out this block?
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
apt-get moo

[David Dotson (confuciusd)]

So, does anyone have a fix for this problem yet? pepito seems to have found something that works for him, but I'm not finding this "compiz-start" thing anywhere. I myself am a relative newb to Linux, so any step-by-step instructions would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

I'm sorry that I can't contribute anything further; all I can say is that it takes a solid 30 seconds for the desktop to fully load after login (with Compiz Fusion and AWN), and this is on a Dell Latitude D620 with 1 gigabyte of RAM and Intel Core 2 Duo processor @2.00 GHz. My three-year-old Intel Celeron desktop loads Feisty's GNOME desktop in exactly 18 seconds after login, with Compiz enabled.

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

i since ditched feisty and went back to messing with gutsy. gutsy is in all a very good developmental release and i hope to see splendiferous things from hardy.

this time however i installed xubuntu.

i enabled compiz/emerald/NetworkManager, and have not had any of the problems described herein. i have read about a bug with compiz that kills the (gnome?)panels as i described above--i still think this may be an underlying issue for many. on my specific machine, i can tell that all applets/panels are loading, but i just cant see ANYTHING until they are all completely loaded. modified bootcharts confirm this. i have read that others compiling the most recent versions of compiz do not encounter this either.

i installed gnome over the top of xubuntu and still the problem persists. i may compile compiz from git and see if that takes care of it, not worried about upgrading to hardy, i always do a clean install.

peace

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

Hi all,

I have a very similar problem. After a bit of digging I found an entry for 127.0.1.1 (notice: .1.1, not .0.1) in my /etc/hosts. I commented it and now the gnome starts fast like in Feisty.

But: why that entry is needed? localhost is on 127.0.0.1, no? Since 1986, no :-)?

[ChristofferS (ubuntu-curo)]

@Romano: tried your fix, didn't work.

I also tried Debian Lenny which has Gnome 2.20 also, and login takes about 20 seconds compared to more than 60 seconds in Ubuntu Hardy.

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

You mean the one that tells your system's hostname?

On Jan 14, 2008 6:31 AM, Romano Giannetti <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a very similar problem. After a bit of digging I found an entry
> for 127.0.1.1 (notice: .1.1, not .0.1) in my /etc/hosts. I commented it
> and now the gnome starts fast like in Feisty.
>
> But: why that entry is needed? localhost is on 127.0.0.1, no? Since
> 1986, no :-)?
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
apt-get moo

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

Yes: what normally there was (at least, when /etc/hosts was written by hand):

127.0.0.1 localhost my_fancy_hostname_not_qualified_here

...and if you have a fixed IP:

127.0.0.1 localhost
10.1.2.3 hostname.domain

...and on our Debian server it's still like that. This "127.0.1.1" thing is quite new for me. I do not know why it should make a difference, but still, it's strange. I suppose an interaction with the name service.

In effect (without any change, with the 127.0.1.1 entry in /etc/hosts):

(0)pern:~/www/DEAROOT% host 127.0.0.1
1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer localhost.
(0)pern:~/www/DEAROOT% host 127.0.1.1
Host 1.1.0.127.in-addr.arpa not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

So there is a difference. Really puzzled.

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

OK, I was wrong. It did not fix the first login for me, just the second and following one. On the first login after boot, entering in gnome is slow as a crawl (20+ seconds). Sorry for the confusion. I will try to dig this more (it didn't happen at all in Feisty).

[Stevie (stevie1)]

hmpf, no solution yet? this is pretty annoying.

the devs seem not really to care...

[bereanone (bereanone)]

Actually I gave up a long time ago. I went out and bought a mac. At least
it's version of unix is supported. Support from Ubuntu is a little sad...

On Feb 6, 2008 8:30 PM, Stevie <email address hidden> wrote:

> hmpf, no solution yet? this is pretty annoying.
>
> the devs seem not really to care...
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

I've been using Fluxbox for the last couple weeks, but then, I don't think
this (borrowed) laptop would handle GNOME too well. Mine needs to have a
lot of hardware replaced :(

On Feb 6, 2008 9:48 PM, bereanone <email address hidden> wrote:

> Actually I gave up a long time ago. I went out and bought a mac. At least
> it's version of unix is supported. Support from Ubuntu is a little sad...
>
>
> On Feb 6, 2008 8:30 PM, Stevie <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> > hmpf, no solution yet? this is pretty annoying.
> >
> > the devs seem not really to care...
> >
> > --
> > [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> > You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> > of the bug.
> >
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
apt-get moo

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Those comments are not really constructive, there is no obvious bug there and the issues described might be a collection of different things and incorrect user configurations. I did new dapper, feisty and gutsy installation on a non-too-new machine some days ago using the same partition and looked at the login speed there. Dapper takes 15 seconds from gdm login validation to an usuable desktop loaded, feisty takes 18 seconds, gutsy takes 26 seconds. Without deskbar-applets in the configuratin there is almost no difference between feisty and gutsy. The login is clearly slower nowadays but that's only some seconds on a default installation and can be explained by the features added since dapper. Now it's likely that some users run into differents bugs, but ideally whoever has the issue should try to look at if a stock user has the same slowness, if not using tracker, deskbar-applet, compiz etc change the speed, etc and comment there

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Seb, just out of curosity, what are your criteria for a "usable desktop loaded"? Do you mean when everything (ie panel applets) is in place *and* the hard drive is quiet? 'cause I based all my numbers on the moment at which the hard drive stops hammering (since I think there is no other way to get valid/reliable/consistent benchmark results).

Recently, I discovered a truly neat tutorial (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565651) for manually using readahead to cut down my login time to 14-20 seconds in gutsy, but it is a hack on top of ubuntu, not a real solution (or at least, I would prefer for ubuntu to do it for me: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/login-readahead)

[cokelly (okelly-ciaran)]

Thanks for that tip Jean-François: that has my time from login down to ~40 seconds. Most acceptable!

[Stevie (stevie1)]

well, i read on ubuntuforums.org that this issue seems solved in hardy.
i guess there wont be a "fix" for gutsy.

concerning the gdm login...
id rather wait a bit more on the complete boot process than after the gdm login.
that readahead thingy had some positive impact here.
before i had to wait a minute til i could work, now its 29 seconds.
honestly, 1 minute is anacceptable. not even windows takes that long.

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

agreed that tip/link from Jean-François worked very well.

i still get the flashing gnome-panels and am seeking a solution to that, the readahead hack sped everything up.. i would make a bootchart but i have changed things, but the blackout after my gnome-panels dissapears is less than 10 seconds now, nearly half the time.

very nice thank you.

[bonsiware (bonsiware-deactivatedaccount)]

some people have this problem since gutsy:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+bug/128803

there's someone who has tricked with bootchart to let it log login process
too...

On Feb 8, 2008 4:10 AM, sweetsinse <email address hidden> wrote:

> agreed that tip/link from Jean-François worked very well.
>
> i still get the flashing gnome-panels and am seeking a solution to that,
> the readahead hack sped everything up.. i would make a bootchart but i
> have changed things, but the blackout after my gnome-panels dissapears
> is less than 10 seconds now, nearly half the time.
>
> very nice thank you.
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[bonsiware (bonsiware-deactivatedaccount)]

sorry!
I posted in the wrong forum...

[bereanone (bereanone)]

Your comments were not really constructive, helpful, or nor do they in
anyway acknowledge a very real problem with an ubuntu installation
gone very wrong. It takes nearly 5 minutes to boot. Nothing that I
have done changed any configuration other then stock installation. I
have enjoyed the look into the Unix world enough however that I
decided to give Unix a closer look and finally bought a Mac.
Hopefully with professional coordinated support I will not experience
the same problems. If the lack of support in the Ubuntu community
breeds frustration in new users, it is hardly a fix for more
experienced users to take the tack of less that constructive criticism
of that frustration. Reeling off benchmarks of seconds means
absolutely NOTHING to those forced to wait nearly 5 minutes for THEIR
particular machine to boot up.

On Feb 7, 2008, at 4:52 AM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

> Those comments are not really constructive, there is no obvious bug
> there and the issues described might be a collection of different
> things
> and incorrect user configurations. I did new dapper, feisty and gutsy
> installation on a non-too-new machine some days ago using the same
> partition and looked at the login speed there. Dapper takes 15 seconds
> from gdm login validation to an usuable desktop loaded, feisty takes
> 18
> seconds, gutsy takes 26 seconds. Without deskbar-applets in the
> configuratin there is almost no difference between feisty and gutsy.
> The
> login is clearly slower nowadays but that's only some seconds on a
> default installation and can be explained by the features added since
> dapper. Now it's likely that some users run into differents bugs, but
> ideally whoever has the issue should try to look at if a stock user
> has
> the same slowness, if not using tracker, deskbar-applet, compiz etc
> change the speed, etc and comment there
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.

[bereanone (bereanone)]

On Feb 7, 2008, at 4:52 AM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

> Those comments are not really constructive, there is no obvious bug
> there and the issues described might be a collection of different
> things
> and incorrect user configurations. I did new dapper, feisty and gutsy
> installation on a non-too-new machine some days ago using the same
> partition and looked at the login speed there. Dapper takes 15 seconds
> from gdm login validation to an usuable desktop loaded, feisty takes
> 18
> seconds, gutsy takes 26 seconds. Without deskbar-applets in the
> configuratin there is almost no difference between feisty and gutsy.
> The
> login is clearly slower nowadays but that's only some seconds on a
> default installation and can be explained by the features added since
> dapper. Now it's likely that some users run into differents bugs, but
> ideally whoever has the issue should try to look at if a stock user
> has
> the same slowness, if not using tracker, deskbar-applet, compiz etc
> change the speed, etc and comment there
>
> --
> [Gutsy] very slow gnome startup
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128803
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.

[C Anthony Risinger (extofme)]

if you want it free youve got to be willing to spend some time wrestling with it..

luckily ubuntu has worked very well on the several machines i have installed it on, for myself and others. however every single one of them had quirks, some of which took a LONG time to figure out, and other less serious ones i have yet to figure out.

the nice part about problems is it forces you to get personal with your machine and actually learn what the computer is doing rather than simply looking at a splash screen?

if you can, put ubuntu back on the machine, all updates, then make a bootchart.. that little program was very useful in diagnosing problems because it visually attaches the time elapsed to individual processes. it has allowed me to explore the scripts in my system i did not even know about.

sudo apt-get install bootchart

the charts (pictures) will be in /var/log/bootchart/

make one of those during the 5 minute wait and maybe we can visually see the culprit in your specific installation.

another possibility would be to disable usplash altogether, so you can see the output instead? an easy way to accomplish this:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

then look under System > Settings > Start-up Manager
good luck to ya

[spanella (spanella)]

personally bootchart won't do anything for me since the problem is not on booting but on gnome login. I believe someone above was able to make it work all the way through the desktop loading, but i don't think i have the technical skills to make that work. If there is an easier way that you know of to analyze the gnome login please let me know and i would be glad to find the problem. however, until that time Gutsy will continue to login to gnome in 2-3min for me.

hoping a clean install of Hardy will make this all go away in 2 short months

[Kai Schroeder (kai-schroeder)]

I have created a graph of a login to gnome in hardy using the method described here:
http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news-2008-02.html
I have applied the patch there to the ubuntu version of gnome-panel (I have actually dropped ubuntu patch 16_* because I was to lazy to have a look why that patch could not be applied to the instrumented source).

I have done the profiling using a freshly created user and I have created the graph during the second login to that users profile. I have stopped shortly after I had a usable gnome-terminal after about 60 seconds.

Looks like there is something strange going on with pulseaudio and esd at the beginning of startup. Compiz wastes a large amount of time finding out the current configuration using glxinfo and nvidia-settings. There are lots of top_panel size requests, I have not yet looked what that means exactly, though. It would also be interesting to know what happens at second 26 - apt-cache and modinfo take a huge amount of time there which is probably not needed at that point of time. I don't know how useful this is, but perhaps someone gets an idea.

[Kai Schroeder (kai-schroeder)]

And attached the strace logfile which I have used to create that graph.

it says there for the esd pulseaudio wrapper
8107 1203029028.058727 read(18, "[esd]\n# autospawning is not reco"..., 4096) = 368

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your work on that, those are useful informations we can use to try working on the login speed

[Patrice Vetsel (vetsel-patrice)]

Just for informations :
http://blog.kagou.fr/post/2008/03/06/Chronos-US-version

[Christopher Denter (dennda)]

Thanks for taking the time to make such comparisons.

I, however, cannot believe they are 100% correct. At least on my machines (and all others I saw) feistys gdm-login was much faster than gutsys...

regards

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

did you read the graph correctly? it indicates that feisty login takes 15 seconds where gutsy takes 22 seconds and hardy 29 seconds

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 9:24 AM, Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> wrote:

> did you read the graph correctly? it indicates that feisty login takes
> 15 seconds where gutsy takes 22 seconds and hardy 29 seconds
>

Yes, but it has been the experience of a large part of this thread that
Gutsy is nowhere near only 22 seconds. More like double that. In my
experience, Hardy is faster than Gutsy. It's definitely closer to Feisty
range.

--
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
apt-get moo

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

you have to consider that is a stock installation and that the machine might be faster than yours, on a some years old a default gusty installation takes around 26 seconds there

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

It seems that Hardy is even slower than Gutsy... In my computer, Gutsy took ~34 secs to load, but now Hardy takes ~1 minute. Almost twice!

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

Yes I agree, HARDY TAKES FOREVER TO BOOT! gosh! it really sucks lol,
but hardy looks nice tho :]

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could users having the issue try to get startup graphs similar to the one sent before?

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

I'll be glad to send you those graphs. How can I generate them? Thanks.

[Kyle M Weller (kylew)]

yes I'll be glade as well, how can I graph my startup as well?

[enigma_0Z (enigma-0za)]

Added nautilus. I believe this is the offending application.

[enigma_0Z (enigma-0za)]

Could someone try this for me:

open a console and do killall nautilus.

If it works (like it does for me), the whole desktop will freeze for roughly the same time as when starting up.

I'm pretty sure that this is a nautilus issue, as my system freezes right before nautilus comes up (no desktop icons), and when it unfreezes, I get them back. I've hacked a workaround for this bug by using the readahead trick here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565651

With this in place, it's not too bad. But there's a pause before GDM comes up now (I'd imagine that readahead is that chugging away here...). After that pause, everything's pretty snappy though.

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 18:30 +0000, enigma_0Z wrote:

> If it works (like it does for me), the whole desktop will freeze for
> roughly the same time as when starting up.

I tried it, but nautilus resumes in normal times... so it's something
else for me.

I have a gut feeling:

I am trying kernel 2.6.25-rc, which works very well for my laptop, minus
the fact that sometime the gnome login fails with strange dbus messages:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10041 . Now the thing is that
when it happens, the login continues and I can enter gnome without my
setting, but _there is no delay_. So I suspect that the delay some kind
of timeout on dbus/socket interaction of gnome-settings-daemon.

Romano

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

I've created an image of the GNOME logging process with bootchart, I'm attaching the image, hope it helps.

[Patrice Vetsel (vetsel-patrice)]

How can I patch bootchart (for gnome login time) ?

[Patrice Vetsel (vetsel-patrice)]

Is this this patch in http://www.gnome.org/~lcolitti/gnome-startup/analysis/ that we should use ?
Is it possible to have an already bootchart packaged ?

[peddy (peddy22)]

how exactly do I use the .diff file to patch it?

I know I need the source and need to use the 'patch' command, but that's about all I know :P

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

You can install bootchart, move the init.d stop-bootchart somewhere else, use autologin and run the stop-bootchart start manually after login

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Would be nice to try again on hardy beta and note if the issue is resolved, we have been doing several changes recently:

- jockey and update-manager delay their update to no slow the login
- deskbar-applet is not in the default configuration and tracker indexing is not enabled by default
- gdm is doing preloading now

Those changes should make login quicker now

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

Thanks, Sebastien. I attach my bootchart I've generated following your instructions. Hope this helps.

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

I'm glad to say that now, in Hardy, GNOME takes ~35 secs to load... It's as fast (or better say, as slow) as Gutsy...

[Stevie (stevie1)]

im not sure but i think the problem comes from GDM and not gnome.
when starting X via startx, i got the feeling that gnome boots much faster.
but i could be wrong...

[peddy (peddy22)]

Here's my one, not completely sure how to read it. Hope it helps.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the bug is not a nautilus one

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

a (small) part of the problem *might* be due to the recent documents? I have no idea if .recently-used.xbel is used during startup, but if it is, it is possible that it contributes to making the login time worse.

http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/?p=317

Examples of performance decrease because of this phenomenon:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512108
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500772

[pescobar (pescobar)]

I am using jaunty x86_64 and found a quick fix by just deleting $HOME/.gconfd/saved_state

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Afaict, the bootcharts are pretty old. It could be interesting if someone could make new login bootcharts for current versions (gutsy? really!?) such as Karmic and Jaunty. And perhaps with gnome-shell in karmic too.