Multiple xfdesktops running, and very slow startup

[Chris G]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 02:02:23PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 01:00:55PM +0100, Ali Abdallah wrote:
> > On 01/15/2010 11:44 AM, Chris G wrote:
> > >     ** (update-notifier:3002): DEBUG: error during dbus call: The name org.debian.apt was not provided by any .service files
> > >
> > The update service 'org.debian.apt' is missing, update-notifier
> > applet is trying to connect to this service, using a D-Bus call,
> > depending on the timeout specified by the update-notifieron this
> > call, it may block for some time, but not up to several minutes,
> > well try to disable this from the autostarted applications  and see
> > if the login speed is better.
> > 
> ... and I've now tried disabling the update notifier, no noticeable effect.
> 
> I'm going to put some debug output in the X startup sequence and see
> if I can see what's going on.
> 
> This *may* not be a new problem (i.e. it may not be due to recent
> changes) I have had slow startups before which I had put down to my
> VirtualBox windows guest hogging the processor but I've turned that
> off now so it can't be that.  I may have previously missed the
> correlation between slow startup and power up.
> 
> Listen to this space .....   :-)
> 
Well *something* is slowing things down dramatically during the 'login
after power up'.  The load average goes up to over 8 and thus
*everything* runs incredibly slowly.  For example the mounting of NFS
drives is ridiculously slow, there's a couple of NFS directories don't
get mounted until *after* the GUI has come up and I can run programs.
I noticed this because my mutt directories are on one of these drives
and running mutt too soon doesn't work.

I'll see if this slowness is nothing to do with the xfce/X login
process, maybe something is running in the background at startup and
hogging some resource.

Something is using lots of memory too, all 8Gb is used up by the time
the desktop is running and before I've done anything much.

-- 
Chris Green