Slow response of X
Hi all,
I have a weird problem with the response time inside X. I am running
Debian Etch, kernel 2.6.12-1-686-smp on a P4 3.4GHz HT with a SATA
drive and 1GB RAM. Whenever I start X (XFCE 4.2.2), I experience the
following problems:
a) When autocompleting a command with TAB in a terminal (mrxvt), it
"freezes" for maybe 3 seconds or more, then proceeds. After the first
time I do it, I have "fast" autocompletions (for other commands too),
at least for a while. I would swear that this problem is not in the
console.
b) When moving the cursor over the icons in the panel, I sometimes get
delays in their focus (and trigger responsiveness). Maybe 90% of the
time the focus is immediate, but a 10% of the times it is not, with
delays of even 10-20 seconds!!
c) Some (all?) the apps take a long time to launch. Maybe they always
did (with my previous computers/kernels), but I'd swear that 30 seconds
to open KMail, or over 15 to start Firefox is not quite correct.
d) Right-clicking on the background produces an XFCE menu (as it should
be), but also with a delay, sometimes null, sometimes of 3-6 seconds.
Somehow (don't ask me how) I thought that I could fix the problem
compiling a custom kernel (2.6.13.4 from kernel.org), because there are
three options that sound interesting:
1) Preemption Model: "No Forced Preemtion (Server)", "Voluntary Kernel
Preemption (Desktop)" and "Preemptible Kernel (Low-Latency Desktop)"
If I understand it right, going from first to third make the system
less "efficient", but more responsive to user input.
2) Preempt The Big Kernel Lock"
Its "help" literaly says "Say Y here if you are building a kernel for
a desktop system"
3) Timer frequency: 100, 250 or 1000Hz
From the "help": 1000 HZ is the preferred choice for desktop systems
and other systems requiring fast interactive responses to events.
Well, I compiled the damned thing with 1) at "Preemptible Kernel", 2)
at "Y" and 3) at 1000Hz, and still have the very same problems.
Could it be related to the HD? I have read somewhere that ReiserFS (the
FS I use for all my partitions) may have been so much "tweaked", that
it was pushed too far and it has speed problems. Could it be the
problem?
Somewhere else a guy with similar problems got a response asking if DMA
was enabled, but my "dmesg | grep -i dma" shows:
DMA zone: 4096 pages, LIFO batch:1
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1F0 ctl 0x3F6 bmdma 0xFFA0 irq 14
ata1: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/133, 398297088 sectors: lba48
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/133
is it fine?
I am presently quite lost, and would appreciate any clues on how to fix
it, or at least what info I need to provide to get the right diagnosis.
TIA,
Basajaun
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