[SOLVED] MintMenu *extremely* slow to load

[kvv]

Hi,

I am running LM10 main edition, 32 bit.
I am suddenly having problems with the mintMenu. It is extremely slow to load (about a minute) when a new session starts, and till it loads, the GNOME panel gets hung up.

Can someone help?

[kvv]

Bump?

Problem still exists. And the other fancy menus just don't cut it, compared to mintMenu.

[Jfryton]

I'm experiencing this same problem.

Kernel 2.6.32-5-686 i686 (32 bit) Distro Linux Mint Debian Edition

[kvv]

If it helps mine is "2.6.35-24-generic-pae"

[/Zoran\]

Well i don't use Mint menu from the start, if you want to disable it and add a "normal" menu, right click on the Mint menu and select remove from panel, and then right click on the panel and go to add to panel, and there you can actually choose from 3 diffrerent kinds of menu, look here



mint menu is more demanding then your usual menus, so if you have a pc which is on the border when it comes to configuration requirements it will be slow....or if you have a lot of entries in it...

[kvv]

Well, that's the whole problem. I have good configurations, and it was working smoothly just before I opened this topic. Intel Core2Duo P6400 4 GB RAM ~2GHz speed.

It could be some of the menu entries, or settings. I will check it out and post here, if I get anything.

Edit: I am using gnomenu now, but like I mentioned earlier, I prefer mintmenu.

[deivid]

I'm experiencing this same problem. It's too bad cause mintMenu is the best mint application in my opinion

[willie42]

Does it load slow or slow download speeds?

[kvv]

If you are asking me, whenever I start a new session (for eg, Log out and Log in), the Gnome Panel and all the applets and launchers load almost immediately. But, the mintMenu takes a very long time to load (about a minute at least).

But, once it loads, it is speedy after that.

[willie42]

What programs are in your startup and if you can provide system specs. What I find that will help us find the issue is what is in your startup programs. I dont know why but I am thinking the issue could be with one of those programs. So the hard part is figuring out which one it is.

[kvv]

Firstly, I checked the startup applications, and there was nothing out of the ordinary in there.

What I did is disabled all the plugins of the mintMenu like Places, Applications, Recent Documents etc, and then saw that it loaded quickly as it should. So, after playing around with this, I found that the problem of slow loading happens when I enable the applications plugin. So, it's possibly a problem with a menu entry, but cannot be sure.

I removed all the Google WebApp entries from the menu, as these were the only things that were different from the other entries, but this did not solve the problem. If there is a way to paste the a list of all menu entries or something like that, let me know. Thanks.

[willie42]

I went in the control center> startup applications and maximized it and was able to put 95 percent of my startup aplications on the screen you could take a screen shot and post it it that a way.

[deivid]

OK, after some research I solved the problem for my specific case. I hope the steps below help someone.

First I tried disabling some startup applications, but after a while I realized that they are not actually loaded by mintMenu... so that was not the issue. The problem are the specific launchers displayed by the applications plugin. A fresh install of mintMenu is supposed to load fine, so the problem must be in manually created launchers.

Code: Select all

ls ~/.local/share/applications/*.desktop

should give you a list of those launchers.

I tried disabling them one by one and see which one was causing the issue. To do that, you can disable launchers by right-clicking mintMenu, clicking on Edit Menu, looking for the specific launcher and deselect the show column. Then you can restart mintMenu by killing it and a window will pop up and ask whether you want to reload it. Click Reload. You can kill mintMenu by executing on a terminal window

Code: Select all

kill `ps ux | grep [m]intMenu.py | awk '{print $2}'`

for example.

In my case, the specific launcher causing trouble was ~/.local/share/applications/matlab.desktop, whose contents where

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Development;
Comment=Start MATLAB - The Language of Technical Computing
Comment[en_US]=The Language of Technical Computing
Exec=matlab -desktop
Icon=/usr/share/icons/matlab.png
Name=MATLAB R2010b
NoDisplay=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application

More specifically, the problem was the icon mintMenu had to load, as I checked by deleting the line Icon = /usr/share/icons/matlab.png from the file ~/.local/share/applications/matlab.desktop and reloading mintMenu as explained before. mintMenu had trouble with that icon because it was huge:

Code: Select all

du -h /usr/share/icons/matlab.png

gives 144K, while standard icons are ~4K!

As I wanted to keep my matlab icon, the solution was resizing the image. I used imagemagick for that:

Code: Select all

sudo convert -resize 48x48 /usr/share/icons/matlab.png /usr/share/icons/matlab-scaled.png

and changed the launcher file to point to the new icon.

[kvv]

Thanks! I probably have the exact same problem, and maybe not with just MATLAB.

Even then, it shouldn't take so much time, as this problem is not there with other menus.

[deivid]

I agree, the loading of icons shouldn't be blocking everything and making mintMenu unresponsive for more than a minute...

Cheers!

[emarti]

Yes! I just had the exact same problem! Thank you so much for this solution.

More specifically, the problem was the icon mintMenu had to load, as I checked by deleting the line Icon = /usr/share/icons/matlab.png from the file ~/.local/share/applications/matlab.desktop and reloading mintMenu as explained before. mintMenu had trouble with that icon because it was huge:

Code: Select all

du -h /usr/share/icons/matlab.png

gives 144K, while standard icons are ~4K!

As I wanted to keep my matlab icon, the solution was resizing the image. I used imagemagick for that:

Code: Select all

sudo convert -resize 48x48 /usr/share/icons/matlab.png /usr/share/icons/matlab-scaled.png

and changed the launcher file to point to the new icon.