Arch Linux

arch_froggy

Member

Registered: 2015-05-19

Posts: 2

Cinnamon Application Startup Slow

Hi all,

pretty much an Arch noob and would greatly appreciate a few pointers...

I have the Cinnamon desktop installed and until a few days ago it was pretty snappy. Currently startup of programs (e.g. Thunderbird, Firefox, Terminal, Nemo etc.) takes up to a minute where it used to be pretty instant. Immediatly closing and restarting of the application is usually faster, but not instantly either.

I am not aware of any specific system changes done that would have led to this behavior, but then again, I am a noob. I did upgrade the system with 'pacman -Syu' and updates have been installed.
I do have the suspicion that it might be related to the SSD (Samsung 1TB MSATA) as browsing the filesystem with Nemo is pretty slow if there are many files to be displayed.

These are the things I have tried so far after doing some research via google:
1) simple speedtest of the SSD
Just to get an idea of the transfer speeds...

hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   22542 MB in  2.00 seconds = 11282.91 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1572 MB in  3.00 seconds = 523.78 MB/sec

hdparm -Tt /dev/sda  and  dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 conv=fdatasync,notrunc

1024+0 Datensätze ein
1024+0 Datensätze aus
1073741824 Bytes (1.1 GB) kopiert, 2.40444 s, 447 MB/s

Not too shabby, if I interpreted the numbers correctly.

2) checked /etc/hosts - as someone mentioned this might be the reason

#
#<ip-address>	<hostname.domain.org>	<hostname>
#
# /etc/hosts: static lookup table for host names
#

#<ip-address>	<hostname.domain.org>	<hostname>
127.0.0.1	localhost.localdomain	localhost archbox
::1		localhost.localdomain	localhost archbox

# End of file

3) tried some SYSTEMD check, but bootup seems to be fine
systemd-analyze blame

           880ms systemd-backlight@backlight:intel_backlight.service
           348ms swapfile.swap
           315ms systemd-journald.service
           283ms dev-sda1.device
           157ms systemd-vconsole-setup.service
           131ms NetworkManager.service
           124ms systemd-journal-flush.service
            99ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
            58ms systemd-sysctl.service
            46ms systemd-udevd.service
            43ms alsa-restore.service
            40ms polkit.service
            37ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
            35ms systemd-binfmt.service
            32ms dev-mqueue.mount
            27ms dev-hugepages.mount
            25ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
            22ms wpa_supplicant.service
            19ms systemd-remount-fs.service
            19ms tmp.mount
            19ms lm_sensors.service
            18ms sys-kernel-debug.mount
            18ms kmod-static-nodes.service
            18ms systemd-logind.service
            16ms systemd-modules-load.service
            14ms systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
            13ms systemd-update-utmp.service
            13ms colord.service
            12ms user@1000.service
            11ms udisks2.service
            10ms accounts-daemon.service
             6ms systemd-random-seed.service
             6ms systemd-user-sessions.service
             5ms upower.service
             5ms avahi-daemon.service
             4ms proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.mount
             3ms systemd-rfkill@rfkill2.service
             2ms sys-kernel-config.mount
             2ms rtkit-daemon.service

4) Installed Gnome, even resulted in even worse performance.
5) Installed XFCE, which  seems to be much better, but I would prefer sticking with Cinammon.

Currently I have no clue as to what the culprit could be and would appreciate it, if someone could give me a push in the right direction...

Thanks!

Durden

Member

Registered: 2011-06-19

Posts: 261

Re: Cinnamon Application Startup Slow

What applications do you have running? Do you have any that start automatically? What's the system load when this is happening?

You say it doesnt happen in XFCE so I doubt its a hardware issue. Also what graphics card are you using? And what driver?

arch_froggy

Member

Registered: 2015-05-19

Posts: 2

Re: Cinnamon Application Startup Slow

@Durden: Thanks for taking the time to look into this...

Yes, I did have a few application set to start automatically (Linphone, Pidgin). Both have been in autostart since before the issue came up. I have removed them, but the problem persists.

Right after logging into Cinnamon, I am not even able to start up the console (as this takes a long time too). The whole GUI becomes unresponsive, meaning I can move the mouse cursor around, but cannot click any menus or the like. Whenever the console comes up and I start a different program (e.g. Firefox), monitoring with TOP shows a CPU usage of around 5%... nothing obvious. Any other way to check or to automatically create a log for that?

With regards to the GPU. This is a Dell XPS15 9530 laptop, with the Intel 4th gen VGA and a Nvidia Geforce GT 750M. Running lspci shows the intel one running kernel module "i915" and the NVIDIA one "nouveau". Not aware that I have updated them. Should I try to install the NVIDIA ones just to rule that one out?

Your comment saying it's unlikely to be a hardware issue as it runs fine in XFCE makes perfect sense. I did the HDPARM checks (and even reinstalled the SSD physically) before installing alternative desktops and maybe I should have done it the other way around, but I read a post of someone having a similar issue, which was caused by some SSD issue.

It just feels like it is stuck waiting for some timeout or something...

Durden

Member

Registered: 2011-06-19

Posts: 261

Re: Cinnamon Application Startup Slow

I brought up the GPU point because I've had similar problems with nVidia, not as extreme as yours but similar enough that it rang a bell. If you have another system, or even a smart phone that you can SSH to your box when it's doing this that would be handy. You could simply run top or htop and see if the load is excessive.

You could also try it under a brand new user. If it happens under a newly created user then you know its a system wide problem and not a setting or something you've enabled.

-todd