Ubuntu
gnome-shell package

12.04, gnome-shell, very bad performance?

Asked by Juan Galan

Okay. I am running a Pavilion DV7; AMD Turion X2 2.10 GHz, 4GB Ram, with an ATI video card Laptop, running on Ubuntu 12.04 x86_64 with gnome-shell as my default.

Now here's the thing. Before this I had Lucid Lynx, 32-bit running proprietary ATI drivers. It never had a problem. It never overheated, the fan never got noisy, and it rarely got slow on me. Doing resource-heavy stuff on it was no problem. It functioned better than it should. However, on Precise Pangolin 64-bit, The laptop overheats, the fan can get real noisy and performance gets really slow. I mean if I have more than 5 tabs open on Google Chrome everything just becomes really crabby. I used to use the open-source ATI drivers, and they work fine with most stuff, but after I noticed how bad my laptop could get it, I switched to the proprietary. The Open-Source are definitely a tad bit faster (faster, but not by too much), however, it still gets really hot, the fan is constantly on, and still crabby. I used the lm-sensors package ( i think that;s what it's called), and it reports the temperature at 87C. I mean... isn't that really critical? I mean I never had this problem with Lucid Lynx. Why should I have this now? Another thing, the battery life is awful. On Lucid it was about 2 and a half hours. ANd now it is less than an hour. Does anyone have any suggestions? They say if the hardware is 64-bit, run x64 because it's faster, but maybe it's because I am running 64bit Ubuntu? If the only solution is back to lucid, it's fine I suppose. I just wish it would at least function as it should. Any help appreciated. Thanks.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

What is the output of:

sudo lshw -C display; lsb_release -a; uname -a

Thanks

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#2

Regarding battery life-, heat-, slow-issues there exist bug reports. Search bug reports with graphics card specs and hp dv7, I'll link some which I know of. Feel free to report bugs regarding each specific issue.
Just for the record, battery life drain was also an issue with Lucid 10.04, e.g. bug 576547
Such issues may base on hardware dependencies but arise also due to speedy evolving hightech and software requirements, 3D, OpenGL

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProcedures

> temperature at 87C. I mean... isn't that really critical?

Simply run in a terminal:
sensors

which also lists the critical values. Usually 95 to 100 is critical.

Afaik gnome-shell uses mutter not compiz as window manager and iirc they've improved the slugginess of mutter (metacity+clutter).
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/FAQ#GNOME_shell_does_not_seem_to_work_with_my_video_card._What_can_I_do.3F

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Juan Galan (soshite) said : 		#3

Output of "sudo lshw -C display; lsb_release -a; uname -a":
PCI (sysfs)
  *-display
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: RS780M/RS780MN [Mobility Radeon HD 3200 Graphics]
       vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics)
       physical id: 5
       bus info: pci@0000:01:05.0
       version: 00
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0
       resources: irq:18 memory:c0000000-cfffffff ioport:7000(size=256) memory:d2400000-d240ffff memory:d2300000-d23fffff
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Release: 12.04
Codename: precise
Linux soshite-laptop 3.2.0-23-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Tue Apr 10 20:39:51 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Output of sensors:

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +73.0°C (crit = +105.0°C)

k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1: +87.9°C (high = +70.0°C)
                       (crit = +115.5°C, hyst = +110.5°C)

It can get hotter than that though. I've seen it reach like 95. When it hits 97 it shuts off.

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