Xfce hardly usable in Jaunty?
I ran into a major issue after upgrading an old Acer Aspire One netbook running Xubuntu to Jaunty. It makes Xfce unusable especially if you have to login/logout or reboot frequently. Fortunately, there is a workaround.
Symptoms
- The xfce desktiop takes minutes to initialize after the login windows. As I login and logout a few more times, the delay increases and goes over an hour.
- Similar symptom when running the update-manager. Starting it up takes minutes/hours, the download and installation of new packages is equally slow and finishing up updates (when update-manager reloads it database) feels like it will never end.
- While I'm waiting the HD light stays solid green. Running pidstat while update-manager is working shows a high number of xfdesktop processes, very high IO activity, crazy context switching and reduced available memory.
Causes
- The Aspire One disk is extyremely slow, any swapping will make the machine slow to a crawl. That's an aggravating factor.
- But what seem to cause the issue is that I have configures Xfce to "Save sessions" on exit. Apparently that causes the same processes (including xfdesktop) to be opened 2x, 4x and more every time an xfce session is started. After a bunch of restarts, the number of started applications is just too high and the AAO can't keep up.
Workaround
In Xcfe "System Settings"/"Session and Startup", uncheck "Automatically save sessions on logout". And in the logout confirmation window, be sure to uncheck the "Save sessions" checkbox.
A bug has been filed in launchpad precisely on that problem and it suggests a workaround: Multiple instances of xfdesktop started simultaneously
rm -rf ~/.cache/sessions rm -rf ~/.config/xfce4/desktop
Then logout and login again. The problem should go away.
