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Two complains: Screen Responsiveness and SuspendToRam/Disk

Hi all!

Firstly, I'd like to say that I love Gnu/Linux and please don't take me wrong. What I'm saying here is based on what I see after using Gnu/Linux for the last 4 years.

About the suspend to ram/disk I understand because it may be very difficult to have it working on all type of hardware. But as it was already pointed out on Ubuntu Brainstorm and I think they are already working on it.

But now, at least to me, the biggest complain I have is the performance of screen responsiveness of gnu/linux desktop. I don't know if this is the correct term, but what I mean is the speed the text is draw in the screen, the speed the windows are rendered and so on. In summary, the perception I have of how fast the screen is drawing its contents.

My experience is based on my old notebook. A Pentium4m with an intel 855gm with shared video memory.
I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 with Gnome.

When I open firefox on my gmail page, for example, the scroll is not so good. The scroll is too slow. On the same hardware, when I boot on windows with firefox the scroll is not perfect but it is much better. I can't even talk about processor usage of firefox. I don't know why this happens. But after so much time using Gnome when I boot up again on windows so a friend of mine who only used windows could work on it, I saw that windowing and screen performance was very very different. I just don't know why it is this way. Another point: Just to change from one tab to another on firefox on my system could make me wait for something like 0.5 seconds. Again, I'd like to say that on windows on the same machine, firefox didn't take so much time like this.

So, I don't know if the problem is in firefox itself. Or somewhere else. I noticed that if I use XFCE I get a better performance on screen rendering but not so much. So, maybe it is Gnome the problem? I noticed that Konqueror on KDE seemed to give me a better screen responsiveness compared to gnome and xfce. Maybe it is a GTK problem? I also thought it could be a problem of X11 but I don't know very well about it to say if it has so much to contribute to this problem or not.

This is what I got with firefox only. If I talk about MPlayer and video performance for example, we have a similar history. On windows, the performance of mplayer is much better. Even when Ubuntu is using XV output driver.

So, please, if someone can explain me this difference and maybe some why's about it. I don't know if I'm saying non sense things and please, correct me if I am. But I really really whish those screen related performance problems were excluded from my gnu/linux experience.

Just another comparison... Before I bought my macbook, I used Ubuntu 8.04 on a sony vaio with a nvidia card 8400GT with 256MB of dedicated video memory and while the screen responsiveness was much much better, of course, I still could see some lags while scrolling the gmail page and while chaging from one tab to other. I had vista installed on it and firefox didn't showed this problem while I was using ff with vista. I don't know if this is a good comparison as I didn't take any numbers of it, but it gives me some practical results about what I feel when using windows, os x and gnu/linux. And as a big fan and advocate of gnu/linux, I repeat, I really really wish those problems to be solved.

Thank you in advance for you time. Please, send your comments.

Comments

Alexandre Gomes said…
I've an old 855GM laptop and never got problems. But I remember back in the days to be able increase the framerate a lot with framebuffer and some tweaks from the web. Fedora ran better than Ubuntu, try glx-gears and glx-info | grep dri

About the slow text, thats pango's fault, gtk is a slow toolkit. Just try a mono(or other intensive) build on gnome-terminal and xterm term, you'll see the difference.
Anonymous said…
Disable smooth scrolling in Firefox. It helps on my laptop. Oddly I do not see that slowness on my main PC.
GrayShade said…
I've always had this feeling in Linux: when I open a tab in Firefox, I can actually see it starting gray and then being filled with white.

Another example would be enabling the option to show the window contents while resizing and do this on a GTK application. You'll most likely see the controls jumping from one place to another, with no resemblance to the normal appearance.

Yet, I've complained about this before and everyone was telling me "this is not possible, Linux is faster/better/cooler/etc. than Windows".
Amber said…
It sounds a lot to me like your not using the optimal video driver.

On my PC (highend), screen draw will be so-so if I use the (GPL) "nv" driver for my graphics card. CPU usage will be in 10-20% with only a window sitting there - nothing done.

Once I switch to "nvidia" driver (binary-only), all problems are gone: my CPU usage is <5% running a full KDE desktop (with opera, thunderbird, amarokk and a lot of konsoles running) and (yippeeeeh) running compiz-fusion in full frills mode :)

Can't complain there. So the only 'downside' to it is that you'd have to use binary-only nvidia or ATI fglrx on some graphics cards. To me, that is fair (after all, 80% of competing OS's is 90% binary only) and I retain the freedom of choice!

For reference: kubuntu hardy LTS 8.04, lot's of funky repo's and running under a Xen kernel.
Amber said…
PS. good results on my laptop using fglrx (using 'standard ati driver' sucks eggs).

Suspend not working is a pain indeed.
Anonymous said…
You should try another distribution or another kernel. I had problems with "-generic" kernel in Ubuntu and I've been using "-386" for a couple of releases. Now I'm with "-generic" and I think something goes wrong... I'm a bit angry with Hardy :)

It is known that certain points in Linux Graphical Architectue have less performance than in other architectures (I think the guilty is the networked protocol... as soon as Xorg splits out its networked protocol XWindows will go quick) but the difference can't be seen without timing something, it excapes to an eye.
Anonymous said…
I see the same problem and have since I installed my ubuntu about 1½ year ago. It is worst when trying to use ctrl-+ to increase text size... In windows on my laptop it is near instant, in linux it can take 15+ seconds.
Using nvidia closed driver and running intrepid.
Anonymous said…
I too have been struggling with slow redraw. Using binary nvidia drivers, on a 8600mGT 512 (256 shared) card, Core 2 Duo2.4g, 3g ram it is unfortunately unbearable. Firefox does redraw slow, but the most noticeable slowdown is in the system monitor when viewing the graphs. I see 1 core take 100% CPU, and then the graph itself sputters and updates sporadically. I posted on Ubuntu forums a while ago, but nothing was resolved. I hope it doesn't matter, but I am using 8.04 installed inside XP on an NTFS partition. I was aware that there may be performance issues relating to disk access, but I was hoping that was it. When using the compiz/built in 3d effects for the desktop, the effects themselves run great, and as fast as they should. But redrawing text, graphics, or anything else before it is sent to the video card is... well, I can watch any and all menus being redrawn.

If I run 8.04 in a virtual machine on XP, everything is as fast as it should be.
@alexandre gomes: Hi! Nice to know you also have 855GM. Do you have windows installed on it? If so, reboot on windows and work on it a little bit so you can feel the difference. Also, make a test of running a video with mplayer and see the cpu usage.

@ivan: I had smooth scrolling disabled. If enabled, things get worse. :(

@grayshade: That's what I see. I hope this problem can fixed soon.

@amber: I was using nvidia proprietary driver. But even there, the performance wasn't so good. I know that with compiz, a lot of window drawing gets much better, but text rendering and scroll still have problems. What do you get if you change from one tab to another on firefox? Do you get any delay?


@Pedro Martínez Juliá: Hi Pedro! How you doing? So much time since last time we talked. Yeah, I also think one possible problem could be the network protocol. I hope they remove this code so we can see if the performance improves.


@davh: Yeah. That's what I see too.

@j: I agree with you. Another thing you can try is to install virtualbox and windows inside it. You will see that video performance on virtualbox is not so bad, even compared to the performance of host! Check it out.

Thanks all for your feedback.
Anonymous said…
I'm wondering, what's with all the people who feel the need to begin and/or end their comments or blog posts with the 'I love Linux' disclaimer?

If the point is valid, it really shouldn't matter if someone loves Linux or not. Are people becoming afraid of rabid Linux fanboys and their idiotic comments whenever some issue with Linux is raised?
Alexandre Gomes said…
While I don't use that laptop anymore I can assure you the performance can be pretty close to the Windows one. I watched hundreds of hours of films and remember to even being able to setup compiz to some degree of success (only couldn't run 3D and videos with compiz enabled) which could be because compiz was alpha (no distro had it in their repos yet at the time).

The main key was dri. Do glxinfo | grep dri and start from there. Also, don't use the i810 driver, use i915 iirc was the best. Lastly check this and enable any modules/configs you don't have already:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Direct_rendering_on_Intel_Extreme_Graphics_(855GM)_chipsets
Alexandre Gomes said…
I'm not sure I read correctly, but DON'T try nvidia or ati binary drivers, they will provide the worst possible performance since the chipset is from intel and those binary drivers would assume you've something like the oldest nvidia card - so no benefits and worst performance than with i810.

I'm not user it was i810 or i830 the default driver Xorg used, but I remember clearly that i915 was the way to go, I also know I used to build my own kernels with dri and i915 only although not necessary it improved performance a bit and with suspend2 it enabled me to unload the video drivers to suspend the laptop.
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