Gnome 2.14 is as slow as molasses ...

[Hans Nieser]

Kiffin Gish wrote:
> Ever since I upgraded from Gnome 2.12 to 2.14 on top of FreeBSD 6.1, I've
> been disappointed with the VERY slow performance of the Gnome Desktop.
> 
> Not only is it very sluggish in general, but most applications take anywhere
> from 30-60 secs to start.
> 
> I thought that Gnome 2.14 was supposed to have all these exceptional
> performance tweaks, but for some reason my system is doing the exact
> opposite.
> 
> Can anyone help me?
> 

Have you tried this? It was posted here by Stephen Bartlett some time ago
and seems to be the solution for most people with slow application startup
in gnome 2.14:

Stephen Bartlett wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 13:55 -0400, Arno R. Schleich wrote:
>> > Dear all,
>> > 
>> > I installed gnoem 2.14 from scratch. The perfromace on a 1Ghz
>> > Athlonrunning FreeBSD6-STABLE is terrible. All gnome applications take
>> > close to 30 seconds to start.
>> > How can this be amended ?
> 
> I had the same problem after upgrading to 2.14 on FreeBSD 6.1 -- most Gnome apps were annoyingly slow to start up: Evolution's Compose window took 11sec, Desktop / Preferences / Sessions took 5sec, etc.
> 
> I rebuilt gnomecontrolcenter2 with -g CFLAG to get debug symbols, then used 'gdb gnome-session-properties' and got a stack trace:
> 
> (gdb) bt
> #0  0x28ec37db in stat () from /lib/libc.so.6
> #1  0x2833ac7c in gtk_icon_factory_lookup_default ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #2  0x2833accd in gtk_icon_factory_lookup_default ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #3  0x2833accd in gtk_icon_factory_lookup_default ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #4  0x2833accd in gtk_icon_factory_lookup_default ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #5  0x2833add3 in gtk_icon_factory_lookup_default ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #6  0x2833d875 in gtk_icon_info_free () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #7  0x2833d97d in gtk_icon_info_free () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #8  0x2833ef88 in gtk_icon_theme_lookup_icon ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #9  0x2833f7f3 in gtk_icon_theme_load_icon ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> #10 0x28338ed6 in gtk_icon_set_render_icon ()
>    from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> 
> Aha!  I had seen mention on various lists that rebuilding the icon cache with gtk-update-icon-cache was necessary ... and I had done that earlier but it didn't help.
> 
> But seeing that the apps were *still* bogged down in icon cache stuff made me think again, and I saw that there's a --force option.  Using that solved the problem!
> 
> FYI, here's how to rebuild all your icon caches (perform this as root) :
> 
> find all the index.theme files:
> 'locate index.theme'
> 
> create a script whose lines have the form:
> 
> gtk-update-icon-cache --force <path>
> 
> where <path> is the directory containing the index.theme file found.  One line per index.theme file, obviously.
> 
> Run the script.
> 
> After this, my Gnome apps all run great.
> 
> - Stephen
> 
> --
> Stephen Bartlett
> President, Bartlett Software, Inc.
> http://www.bartlettsoftware.biz/
> 

I don't know if there's a FAQ entry for this (and I'm terribly lazy so I'm
not going to check :p), but if there isn't, there should be one!