My GNOME is slow. By this I'm not talking about application loading times, or the time the system takes to boot, but the actual "snappiness" of the GTK GUI.

Buttons only visually indent if I hold down the mouse for a second, menus don't pop up instantly when I click them, tabbed applications (especially Gaim) take time to load the new widgets, and you can see the windows redraw themselves from white whenever I alt-tab to them.

I hate to bring up the old Windows comparison, but my XP installation has no such delay, no matter what crazy theme I have applied. Even GTK applications running on XP are faster than they run on my Ubuntu installation (512 RAM, Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon X850 XT w/fglrx drivers).

Does anyone else observe this or is it peculiar to my system? I get some speed increase when using a really old theme like Raleigh, but I really don't want to use that.

Thanks,
Raeth

And what theme are you using, is that Raleigh theme as fast as it should be, or is it still slow?

Also, is your system under big load?

Raleigh is faster, but it's still not as fast as Qt or GTK running on Windows.

My system's not under big load, but I have a little CPU metre on the desktop which seems to spike on seemingly non-intensive tasks like dragging windows around.

ok, just out of curiosity, are you running off the CD? If Raleigh is faster, it could be because it uses a non-pixmap theme engine, pixmaps themes need bigger memory and require more disk access, if your running off a slow medium, like a CD, it might cause that. How good is other performance? Fast app startups, etc? If your running on a hard drive, check to make sure its using DMA.

Another possible cause is low memory, but 512MB should be plenty, check to see if any apps are hogging all the memory.

use "hdparm" to check the hard disk, "free" to see how much memory you have, and "top" to see what apps are eating that memory up (press "m" in top so it lists by memory usage)

edit: actually, dragging windows around can be very CPU intensive due to how X works, and spikes shouldn't be a cause for a problem, as it should only say that the CPU is being used well, the Linux CPU scheduler will make sure apps get a fair use of the CPU, so a spike on various operations should be normal.