When Gnome and Firefox Are Dead Slow

Posted on November 14, 2009, under GNU/Linux.

I’ve had Ubuntu Karmic Koala installed on my MacBook Pro Core2Duo for 2-3 weeks now. Almost everything’s been working perfectly. However, whenever I’d start a second Gnome session and run Firefox, the machine would slow to a crawl, and X’s CPU usage would skyrocket..we’re talking >80% here.

I scoured Google for all sorts of things:

Gnome second session is slow
Gnome X is slow
Gnome Xorg is slow
Gnome Firefox slow
X second session is slow
Etc.

I found several other reports of this, but no solutions.

Eventually, I stumbled upon this blog post, which purports to have solved the problem. I gave it a shot, and holy shit, it worked!

Just to be verbose, here’s what I did:

Open /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

Add this line to the “Device” section:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

So my “Device” section now looks like this:

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "Configured Video Device"
  Option      "AccelMethod" "XAA"
EndSection

Save the file and log-out of Gnome.
Switch to tty1 by hitting CTRL+ALT+F1 .
Restart GDM:
```
$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart
```

Share and Enjoy:

3 Replies to "When Gnome and Firefox Are Dead Slow"

xvichyx on February 1, 2010

just use Kubuntu, or ach

n on February 7, 2010

Did not work for me, instead kept the xserver from starting, forcing me into a tty. Still searching for a solution

nick on March 13, 2010

@xvichyx Yeah, I’ve switched back to Kubuntu. I’ve never been a Gnome guy, but I figured I’d give it a shot since so many people rave about it.

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