Linux Mint Forums

I had been running Linux Mint Gnome on my wife's computer for two years until recently. Mint 8 and and Mint 10 both performed superbly. Mint 13 MATE has now been on there for a few weeks - it is stable and reliable, but not as responsive. This is especially noticeable in the desktop display and the file manager. On boot, the taskbar and wallpaper appear soon enough but there is a wait of many seconds before desktop icons appear. Caya is often slow to start, and slow to display icons and previews in folders that contain many files. Earlier editions of Mint have been much more responsive on this computer.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I start troubleshooting this?

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+
  2Mb RAM
  ATI RS690 (Radeon X1200 Series)

I am not using (or attempting to use ...) Compiz.

Would the computer benefit from a proprietary video driver of any kind? If so, how would I set about finding and installing one?

Thanks in anticipation to anyone who can help.

To;pic moved here by moderator.

I have to agree on this. I upgraded from Mint 9 (Isadora) which was a perfect responsive Mint version.
Due to upcoming end of support (April '13) I decided to upgrade to Mint 13 Mate.
I love the OS and I am very thankful with the developers but I really don't like the slow boot time.
XP boots fully in 25 seconds on this system, Mint 9 took aprox 30 second but Mint 13 takes 55 seconds!
Before it was 60 seconds but I disabled some program startups and set the swappiness to 10 instead of the default 60.
Still is 55 seconds a pretty long time to boot when I compare it with the 30 seconds from Mint 9.
There is indeed a long delay before the icons apear on the desktop but the menu button takes the longest.
Does anybody have an idea what causes the slow boot time from Mint 13 Mate or how to speed up it's boot time?
Here are my specs:

-Computer-
Processor : AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3400+
Memory : 1025 MB
Operating System: Linux Mint 13 Maya
-Display-
Resolution : 1280x1024 pixels
OpenGL Renderer : Gallium 0.4 on NV34
X11 Vendor : The X.Org Foundation
Audio Adapter : VIA8237 - VIA 8237

-SCSI Disks-
ATA QUANTUM FIREBALL
ATA MAXTOR STM325082
HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR8164B
BENQ DVD DC DW1670

I don't find boot time slow, and I have a 20GB seagate hard drive for the OS (I should put a 40GB in its place)

Thanks for replies and comments.

• In my case the "slow boot time" is the length of time it takes for the desktop to be populated with icons and for everything to work. The taskbar and start button appear quickly enough, but it takes at least another 30 seconds for the desktop to be fully functional.
  
  I also know that sometimes Caya takes a long time - several seconds - to display the contents of a folder. Mint 8 and Mint 10 were MUCH snappier, on exactly the same hardware. I had wondered if this was related in any way to the desktop slowness on startup.

Any other suggestions would be gratefully received! If the problem persists I may give the XFCE edition a try.

I may have resolved the problem with the slow-loading desktop. I disabled Zeitgeist from Startup Applications and things seem a lot snappier.

fraxinus_63 wrote:I may have resolved the problem with the slow-loading desktop. I disabled Zeitgeist from Startup Applications and things seem a lot snappier.

I tried this but I didn't see any improvement.

It's a far shot, but did you by any chance preserve your old home folder when you made the switch?
Could be some config file is confusing Mint every time it starts.

If you still use your old /home, try setting up a new user with a name never used. If this user gets a snappy experience, some config hassle is probably the cause. I'd recommend moving all important data to a new user then, because searching the one settings file that is the problem seems way to difficult for me.

I think fraxinus_63 & I do Mint are missing the obvious Mint8,Mint9, and Mint 10 were Gnome2 Mint 13 is MATE a fork*** of Gnome 2, it's not the same thing. Compared to Ubuntu 10.04 (Gnome 2) my start up is a wee bit slower, give or take 10 seconds but Linux Mint has always been slower to boot then other distros in my experience so it doesn't bother me. Moreover I have dual boot with Windows XP and its boot time is relatively the same.

GX 280
Processor: Intel Pentium (R) 4 3GHZ
Ram: 2GB


*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28so ... lopment%29

I suffer some slowness but mainly because :
- I use a very old hard drive for the system (20GB, not sure of the rotation speed)
- Firefox uses over 1GB memory, from the 2GB I have (the tabs pile up). I use a lot of memory because I read too much and websites are heavy

So, i have some little delays, for instance clicking the applications/places/system menu : it took half a second to come up, while the hard disk was grinding, for launching "Startup Applications" in preferences about 3 seconds. Something like Vlc needs about 7 seconds to startup.
I call this slow, but my computer is convenient to use otherwise.

"I do Mint", I can see you have this hard drive, are you using it for the OS, what capacity does it have?
It's probably the slowest thing in your computer. Then you have "only" 1GB memory but it's not a big problem if you don't end up with over 100 tabs in Firefox or do some other memory-heavy things.

-SCSI Disks-
ATA QUANTUM FIREBALL

TheDynamicHamza21 wrote:I think fraxinus_63 & I do Mint are missing the obvious Mint8,Mint9, and Mint 10 were Gnome2 Mint 13 is MATE a fork*** of Gnome 2, it's not the same thing.

No - I do understand that MATE is not strictly the same as Gnome 2.

While MATE is intended as a Gnome 2 successor, I am not expecting it literally to perform in the same manner to Gnome 2 in every respect. A few secs slower on boot, for example, would not bother me at all. I would hope, however, that it would perform acceptably on kit that ran recent versions of Gnome 2 like a charm.

This was not the case at first, as I had a VERY slow-loading desktop and also a file manager that frequently took ages to load, especially when opening folders containing lots of data. Now that I have disabled Zeitgeist, these problems have ended. Interestingly, I had Zeitgeist enabled on none of my previous Mint/Gnome 2 installs, which make me suspect it was the problem - I think it is enabled by default in Mint 13 MATE.

I have the same problem; actually it seems that Mint 13 is geting slower and slower!
See the attached bootchart logs; boot time is now 2:13min....
Is there anyone who has experience with Bootchart and is willing to explain it to me?
What does it mean, and where does it go wrong? Are there unnecessary boot programs?
How can I speed up the bootprocess?


Thanx!