Slow refresh: nautilus

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
> Hi, you might remember I wrote about patterned slowdown over the GNOME 
> desktop last week. Since then my superblock was corrupted, the entire 
> root partition was lost, and I had to reinstall (twice). On the bright 
> side, the new Fedora system is much faster than before, and does not 
> suffer from the slowdown issue. I am using the latest kernel now, with 
> the oss nv driver.
> 
> But... I do see a strange issue, that I don't think is normal. When 
> switching from a maximized app to an empty workspace, redraw of the 
> background is particularly slow - it takes about 1 sec on Athlon 1600+. 
> During that time the icons disappear. This might not seem slow, but it 
> gets really annoying. The CPU spikes to 100% every time. I see the same 
> thing when opening new folders in nautilus. I don't use nautilus for 
> file management, but I imagine this would be really annoying for those 
> that do. (as an aside, I am trying to test this w/ fullscreen folders, 
> but the spatial feature that remembers where each folder was opened and 
> how large it is doesn't seem to work currently)
> 
> Is anyone else seeing the same issue.....
> I was not seeing this before, but I was using the accelerated nvidia 
> driver.
> 
I'm seeing the same things and in my case it has to do with Xorg hitting 
fallback paths and using the CPU where it should use the on-card blitter. 
This happens with the radeon driver (on an r300 based card) and the nv 
driver (on a gforce 2mx). It seems pixmaps are stored in host memory rather 
than the on-card memory which prevents the blitter from accessing them.

Regards,
   Dennis