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Asked: 2012-12-04 08:36:09 +0800 CST

What is causing Unity to be slow on startup?

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A few days ago I noticed that after I login in, the top panel and the dash took a bit more time to load and I noticed more disc activity than usual.

I thought that it might have been caused by some update or by the installation of pdftk. So I removed pdftk but the "problem" persists.

Is there a way to know what is using the disc (read/write operations) on startup?

If it were at a later time, I would use iotop but I can only launch iotop after I get control of the desktop.

I'm on Ubuntu 12.10 amd64.

Edit

I took a look at the logs and in the Xorg.0.log file I found the following lines:

[    36.230] (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-ED81635D9DABCAA502951B920776FB5895D92DC0.xkm
[  6683.340] (II) XKB: generating xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-7111F82C412662D491D0F0A3A5A74C8F62B59F29.xkm

Could this be the problematic step?

12.10

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is the same problem i "WAS" facing but solved it, seems like a startup application was causing that problem.

    Ok here is what i did -

    sudo sed -i 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g' /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

    open startup application then uncheck - DISK NOTIFICATION (The Disk Utility notification is used to report disk failures using the SMART predictive technology). It explains your quote also

    I noticed more disc activity than usual

    if u like u can also shutoff (it depends on your needs) -

    AT-SPI D-BUS BUS, Backup Monitor, Check for new hardware drivers, Desktop Sharing, Onboard, Ocra Screen Reader, Personal file sharing,

    Before unity was taking near approx. about 20 seconds to load now it takes 3 seconds roughly.

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  2. What I would do for that is to open a console (or two) while the system starts with Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2 then use top in conjunction with iostat -x (from sysstat package) to determine what's happen.

    Other useful tools you may need some time for that kind of problem are those from inotify-tools package : inotifywait and inotifywatch which permits to monitor files accesses.

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  3. Careful scrutiny of the logs should yield some information. While it might seem a bit tedious the logs can reveal some very interesting information about the machine as it is booting. For example the kernel log (/var/log/kern.log) gives a blow-by-blow description of what is happened timed down to the closest millisecond.

    If kern.log doesn't reveal any useful information, try syslog and even authlog. You are looking for anything unusual such as error messages or something that gets repeated or retried many times. Most of the logs are time stamped to the millisecond, which can be really useful if you can synchronize real world problems with system time.

    Try running "log file viewer" and using that as an assistant. It helps a bit by putting all available logs in front of you, and giving you the ability to only look at todays logs.

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  4. Have you ever logged in to a gnome classic session? There is a bug in compiz which causes it to start extremely slowly if you do that even once and then go back to using unity:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+bug/1001138

    The workaround is to edit ~/.config-bad1/compiz-1/compizconfig/config and delete the following lines:

    [gnome_session]
profile =
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  5. You could try choosing "Advanced Options for Ubuntu" In the boot loader, choose the recovery mode and It should show some information. Sometimes you have to be quick reading it

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