gnome 2.14 performance degradation (slow app startup)

[Stephen Bartlett]

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/
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