Arch Linux

CommanderCool

Member

Registered: 2012-09-05

Posts: 29

[solved] Super slow icon drawing in some applications

Hi,

I am having problems with some applications, that is Libreoffice and ImageJ. Some icons in the menus (Libreoffice: check marks in the view menu; ImageJ: all icons in the top row) seem to be drawn pixel by pixel at a rate of about 1 pixel per second. This results in system freezes of some minutes where nothing moves (except the icon and the mouse cursor). The freeze ends with the completion of the icon, but restarts when the icon has to be redrawn.

I hope you can give me a hint on where to look for the solution because this problem renders these applications unusable.

Thanks!

Last edited by CommanderCool (2014-01-29 10:21:17)

CommanderCool

Member

Registered: 2012-09-05

Posts: 29

Re: [solved] Super slow icon drawing in some applications

Maybe someone can point out to me what these two applications have in common, what libraries both use... ?

CommanderCool

Member

Registered: 2012-09-05

Posts: 29

Re: [solved] Super slow icon drawing in some applications

The same problem occurs in a Java program I wrote some time ago which uses drawLine() from awt.

Java version: jdk7-openjdk-7.u51_2.4.4-1 . Libreoffice is independent of that anyway.

I am running a 64bit machine which is up to date.

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: [solved] Super slow icon drawing in some applications

I'm so intrigued by this problem and have been following your thread since the beginning. I have no idea what's going on (and apparently no one else does either ) so might as well start with the basics:

What graphics card and driver are you using?

The only "icons" that are being drawn slowly are some "interface icons" (check boxes, lines...) and not "picture icons" (PNG, SVG...), correct?

I agree that the problem doesn't seem to be Java itself, but it certainly could be related somehow... If you have a live Linux disc of, say, Linux Mint lying around you could boot into that and see if LibreOffice behaves correctly for comparison, but I have a feeling you wouldn't see the same bug.

CommanderCool

Member

Registered: 2012-09-05

Posts: 29

Re: [solved] Super slow icon drawing in some applications

I use a ATI HD 7770:
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde XT [Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition]

And the open source driver, which according to the xorg logs is loaded successfully:
local/xf86-video-ati 1:7.3.0-1 (xorg-drivers xorg)
local/ati-dri 10.0.2-1

As I just tried to reinstall the drivers, the situation improved significantly: Now it only takes about 30s to load the top row of icons in imagej (compared to several minutes before). So this actually seems to be a driver issue. See a (randomly googled) image of the interface to understand the scale of the problem:

As you expected, the problem only affects icons that are drawn at runtime, not those that seem to be loaded from files.

I will try and run a bootable linux disc tomorrow.

Last edited by CommanderCool (2014-01-28 10:54:12)

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: [solved] Super slow icon drawing in some applications

As I just tried to reinstall the drivers, the situation improved significantly: Now it only takes about 30s to load the top row of icons in imagej (compared to several minutes before). So this actually seems to be a driver issue.

You mean you did "pacman -S xf86-video-ati" and the situation improved? This doesn't make sense to me. In Arch Linux, if a package installation succeeds then it's the same as any other installation. None of the files changed because of pacman. Did you do a full power-off / power-on reboot too?

If you do think it's a driver problem, you can also try installing the "xf86-video-ati-git" package from the AUR.

CommanderCool

Member

Registered: 2012-09-05

Posts: 29

Re: [solved] Super slow icon drawing in some applications

Problem resolved by removing drivers which I installed accidentally, and which, as far as I can tell, were not active anyway. I am not sure how that worked but everything is back to normal.

Thanks to drcouzelis!