Comment 24 for bug 94048

First of all, gnome apps are starting fine and fast on my two feisty installations without this modification.

Anyway, I think strace should show where the slowdown happens quite clearly. If for example gnome-terminal is one of the apps that start slowly, strace can be used like this (when using bash):

strace -r gnome-terminal -x echo &> /tmp/log

With option -r, strace counts the time for each syscall, and gnome-terminal will quit immediately after executing the echo command. The log will be in /tmp/log, each line starts with a number telling how long executing the call took, and most of them will be close to zero. When the slowdown happens there should be one or maybe few lines with abnormally high values (probably several seconds, if the app really is taking 5-10s to start).

Maybe someone with the slowdown could attach the log here, or maybe just few lines around the "slow" call? A quick way to check if there are some offending lines in the log is

grep -v '^\ *0' /tmp/log

which will show if there are lines in the log which took >= 1 second (lines which don't start with a zero).