GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 687849
Opening the Activities overview is slow and initially takes many seconds on a cold start
Last modified: 2012-11-27 23:51:41 UTC
Followup to bug #655850. Now, searching the applications doesn't lag at all... but it seems like the problem was just moved elsewhere: on a cold start, when you click the Activities button (or press the Logo key, or go to the hotcorner), you will have to wait for 2-7 seconds with heavy I/O before anything shows up. During that process, the UI is mostly locked up. This is especially noticeable with netbooks and older computers (don't try this with a SSD).
I can confirm the problem on GNOME 3.6 running with bleeding edge Fedora 18, on a Lenovo Thinkpad X121e. I have to wait around ~6-7 seconds, and the whole system is unusable during that time.
I am hitting this one also. I only have to wait about 1-2 seconds. I think this issue may be because the SVGs for the icons in the overview are now rendered for the first time that the overview is activated.
(In reply to comment #2) > I think this issue may be because the SVGs for the icons in the overview are > now rendered for the first time that the overview is activated. I think (or at least, hope) that the shell uses the png icons and not the svg ones.
We use whatever GtkIconTheme returns. I don't know if it prefers scalable icons or not. You can try passing the correct NO_SCALABLE flag to the GtkIconTheme call in st-texture-cache.c to see if it has an impact on performance.
When stracing the shell, I don't see any app icon svgs being opened when going to the overview for the first time.
Is there something else that happens on the first load of the overview that would be causing this wait?
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 687364 ***