Display latency with Radeon Mobility 7500 [solved]

[boatman9]

Since I've installed M2010.0 KDE4, Firefox and OpenOffice Calc have unusual latency when updating the video display. My computer is a 2.4GHz Compaq N610c.

 

A small spreadsheet now takes 9 seconds to display when maximizing it from the task bar, or moving about the spreadsheet once it is on screen.

 

Firefox (3.5.5) is often slow responding to page-up and page-down. For instance when I page-down to the bottom of https://mandrivausers.org/ then page-up to top (3 pg-ups to reach top) the second page-up takes 4 seconds before the page appears in it's final form. Below is a snapshot of top sometime during those 4 seconds. What can I do to make Firefox faster? Would it help if I was using Gnome instead of KDE4?

 

Tasks: 112 total,   3 running, 109 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 89.1%us,  6.6%sy,  0.0%ni,  4.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1033196k total,   992620k used,    40576k free,    37464k buffers
Swap:  1262512k total,     2440k used,  1260072k free,   591468k cached

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 896 root      20   0  150m  58m 6596 R 86.7  5.8  33:40.13 X
1142 user      20   0  261m  37m  25m S  3.3  3.7   1:30.61 plasma-desktop
27680 user      20   0  238m  83m  26m R  2.0  8.3   2:32.13 firefox
28229 user      20   0 94184  16m  12m S  0.7  1.6   0:01.59 konsole
1138 user      20   0  237m  22m  17m S  0.3  2.3   0:07.79 kwin
   1 root      20   0  1796  564  496 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.88 init
   2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd

Edited December 18, 2009 by boatman9

[Kieth]

The Mandriva 2010.0 errata page talks a bit about this. errata

[boatman9]

Thanks for the tip, it seems to have helped, but I'm still seeing more latency than I'd like. I turned off IPv6 and rebooted, now it seems faster but Firefox paging up/down still sometimes has a 1 second latency before the scroll bar falls into the final location. I'm getting the Gnome live CD now and will test with Gnome later.

[daniewicz]

Anything suspicious from dmesg?

[boatman9]

I installed 2010.0 Gnome and problem persists. Firefox is still very slow, my laptop computer runs hot and CPU fan runs more than normal. When viewing videos at www.hulu.com Mandriva 2010.0 Gnome is not fast enough to show every frame in full screen mode, although this works well on same computer when running Windows, and also worked well under previous versions of Mandriva on same computer. I think something went wrong during installation of 2010.0, but am unsure how to diagnose the problem.

 

I have attached the full text of my dmesg file in case someone can find a clue there.

dmesg-01.txt

Edited December 18, 2009 by boatman9

[boatman9]

My 2.4 GHz laptop computer is still running slowly with Mandriva 2010.0 Gnome. I may have to get another laptop because of this problem. It's strange that Mandriva 2010.0 runs fairly well on my 700 MHz desktop but is slow on my 2.4 GHz laptop. I wonder if the slowness is something to do with the video card driver, slowness seems to be related to updating the video display, whether it's in Firefox or paging up/down in a text editor.

[boatman9]

The problem has been solved! While messing with my dual monitor issue I happened to turn off "3D hardware acceleration". The next time I loaded the graphical server there was no unusual latency in my display. The option I changed is found in MLCC / Hardware / Set up the graphical server / Options / 3D hardware acceleration /.

[daniewicz]

I am happy you got things working. Disabling 3D hardware acceleration is OK as long as you are not gaming in any way.