When Gnome and Firefox Are Dead Slow

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

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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:

  1. Open /etc/X11/xorg.conf .
  2. 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
  3. Save the file and log-out of Gnome.
  4. Switch to tty1 by hitting CTRL+ALT+F1 .
  5. Restart GDM: 
    $ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart