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:

5 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.

Randy Wilson on October 7, 2010

Under Ubuntu 10.04, there is no longer an xorg.conf file. So now what?

nick on October 7, 2010

@Randy By default, Xorg in Ubuntu 10.04 detects everything automatically, and doesn’t need /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

However, if you create xorg.conf , it should be read and used. See this post for confirmation.

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