Firefox tabs slow on 8600M GT

[eteq]

I have a brand-spanking new Asus F8SV-B1 laptop with a nVidia 8600M GT with Ubuntu Gutsy... after trials and tribulations installing the nVidia drivers (eventually ended up having to compile a customized kernel... but I now have the new 169.07 nVidia drivers working), I have CF working. But I'm having some strange performance problems... I use firefox as my browser, and its painfully slow switching to a new tab (as in a ~1-2 second delay). This is the only real problem, but I have also noticed some other suggestive symptoms:
*When focusing on a terminal window, sometimes right after switching response is a bit slow (e.g. I type a command, and it takes about 3 sec to appear, and then runs smoothly unless I leave and come back).
*I tried running glxgears, and it works well, but if I drag the window over anywhere, focus on some other window, and re-focus, it suddenly gets really choppy for ~1-2 seconds.

Note that the slow tabs only seem to happen when I'm using emerald... the glxgears thing is greatly improved by switching to the gtk decorator, but I think it's still there just a little bit... (although I'm not certain...)

Xorg.conf is attached ... anyone know of any other useful logs that might give my some more information of possible errors?

Note: this may be related to this post (http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=5951) or this one (http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=5497), but the symptoms are a bit different (I don't have the "black windows" reported there, and I'm running in GNOME).

[zeuice]

I seem to be getting exactly the same issue. I did assume it was a compiz issue, but thanks to your tip, switching emerald to metacity put tab switching back to expected response times.

I also have exactly the same video card on pikey dell inspiron.

So.. does anyone have any ideas? Other than then not using emerald ofc :-P

[coz]

Hey guys,
This is a problem with the 8xxx series cards on linux. IT may also be the driver in combination with it. Let me just give a few links to read.
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3777
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=93082
you may want to google either "ubuntu 8xxx nvidia cards" or "linux 8xxx nvidia cards"
You will get a bunch of hits on this, most likely, as i did.
I dont have a solutions for you guys but I can say that many with this 8xxx series nvidia cards have come into #compiz-fusion irc with similar compalints.

coz

[eteq]

Well, as I said, I have the bleeding-edge drivers, and while it's substantially improved from some other peoples' results, it still has the problems I've cited in emerald (works like a charm with gtk-window-decorator, though).

Perhaps the most important question: does anyone know of any log files or the like that th nVidia drivers might write to with some sort of warning (e.g. some rendering pathway in emerald might be doing something that's been deprecated or much less efficient with a newer architecture or something)?

[zeuice]

COZ, thanks for the links.

btw, just updated to latest nvidia driver using envy and it seems (anecdotally) slightly slower than the stock gusty drivers when switching between firefox tabs.

[zeuice]

Strange.. have just replaced emerald with metacity and tabs are still slow to respond. This with any GTK tabbed app(tried galeon, gedit), kde tabbed seem to be fine.

[bart]

Hi

Same here but I have a 8600GT Desktop card, slow, slow, slow........

Swapped it for a 7300GS card I had and it works way faster and smother than the 8600GT card.

Regards
Daniel

[manull]

Hi,

i have the same problem too. After i was playing with Emerald, i found out that the problem can be minimized by using Emerald Pixmap themes. I kown that this doesn't resolve the bug, but it helps to use firefox without switching to metacity.

best regards
manull

[devnater]

Hi,

i have the same problem too. After i was playing with Emerald, i found out that the problem can be minimized by using Emerald Pixmap themes.

I run an 8600M GT also, and am confirming the above. no other change makes as big of a difference in tab switching response time as does this suggestion. it's a shame but the slow response gets frustrating very quickly.

[dave_p_b]

Hi

Just to confirm that I have an Asus Aspire 5920G with a nVidia 8600M GS card. When I use the Emerald theme, actions such as Minimize, Maximise, Show Desktop and a few others are really slow to complete. The problem disappears when I switch to the kde-window-decorator theme and everything is back to normal.

Would be nice to work out how to fix this.

All the best

Dave