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I see tons of people complaining about Unity speed and I think the problem is not with the video drivers.

When I login to Gnome Classic the system is behaving just fine, but when on Unity I can barely do use it: windows are moved hard, terminal is damn slow.

Is there any solution or bug that I should track?

Details

  • Ubuntu 12.04
  • Two monitors setup
  • Latest Nvidia proprietary drivers (tested with default ones also, no change)
  • 6GB RAM, Xeon @ 2.8
  • Nvidia Driver 280.13 - Quadro NVS 295 with 8 cores 256MB RAM.
lspci | grep VGA 
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G98 [Quadro NVS 295] (rev a1)

uname -a
Linux sorins 3.0.0-16-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 14 12:48:51 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Update: also tried latest nvidia drivers from nvidia, still Unity was unusable, initially working fine but after several hours becoming slow, even for very simple things like terminal.

Currently the only solution that worked was to switch to KDE. Now this is running just fine.

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More information is required: System Specs? Version of Ubuntu? Graphics drivers? Compiz configuration? Output of top while logged in to Unity? – Jeff Welling Apr 5 '12 at 15:28
@JeffWelling Nice one :) I am used mostly with OS X and Unity is supposed to go in that direction. Shortly, I was looking for Pin/Docker and Find (Cmd+Space) which kinda works. Still, the system performance is unacceptable. – Sorin Sbarnea Apr 5 '12 at 15:36
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Potentially relevant: askubuntu.com/questions/67194/unity-runs-slow – Jeff Welling Apr 5 '12 at 15:42
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Also askubuntu.com/questions/67076/… – Jeff Welling Apr 5 '12 at 15:43
When you say your running Ubuntu 11.00, can you elaborate? I thought it was just 11.04 or 11.10? Am I crazies? Can you check the terminal output from the command cat /etc/issue for me? – Jeff Welling Apr 5 '12 at 15:46
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closed as too localized by jrg♦ Dec 26 '12 at 0:55

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

2 Answers

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Try updating the nVidia drivers from ppa. In terminal, try;

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

That was the only way the nVidia proprietary drivers worked for me

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Already did this. – Sorin Sbarnea Apr 5 '12 at 17:34
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By default, (from my experience) gnome-classic uses metacity window manager and unity uses compiz window manager ( Yes, compiz is not just a window manager ), and compiz is heavier than metacity, because it provides many extra functionality, such as transparency, fade effects, animations and many more.

So, I think there is no surprise that, Unity slowing down while gnome-classic just working file. If there is very big difference, then there may be some driver problem or a problem specific to your hardware.

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