[gentoo-user] Abysmally slow 2D performance using proprietary Nvidia driver on dual Xeon system (EMT64)

[Greg Bur]

Greetings,

I have been trying to fix a somewhat puzzling and annoying problem over the last couple of months that has me absolutely stumped.  I have been unable to isolate the cause of the problem and it appears to be intermittant at best.  The issue rears its ugly head as follows:

This is on a dual boot workstation with a Supermicro X6DAL-XTG motherboard, dual 3.0GHz Xeon processors and a GeForce 6600GT video card.  The system has worked splendidly since I purchased it back in June with one exception:  occasionally when rebooting the system to return to Linux from Windows the 2D performance in Gnome is terrible.  The problem does not appear immediately nor does it happen every time.  Initially gdmgreeter appears as it should and I enter my login credentials.  The Gnome desktop loads quickly and as I start to work applications load normally.  However, after about 10 minutes the system load on one processor sharply increases to 100% when performing a simple task such as clicking on a button in Firefox, launching a new gnome-terminal window or clicking on the "Applications" menu at the top of the screen.  The response time between clicking and the menu appearing for instance is anywhere from 2-5 seconds.  There does not seem to be any quick fix for this which is what has me puzzled.  If I close all of my applications, log out and log back in the problem "resets."  Rebooting the system proves ineffective as well.  I have tried various driver revisions, currently using 1.0.6629-r4, and several different kernels to no avail.  I have tried both enabling and disabling the RenderAccel option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and that does not appear to make any difference.  Adjusting the NvAGP option does nothing nor does enabling the Composite option however the system seems more responsive when the Composite option is enabled.  Switching to the "nv" driver resolves the problem and the system remains snappy with no immediate problems.  Occasionally I will begin to get artifacts on the display with the nv driver and then the screen goes entirely white but switching to the console using ctrl + alt + F1 usually resolves this problem.  I would appreciate any insight anyone could provide as to what I am overlooking.  I have walked through the Gentoo Nvidia documentation numerous times and I have consulted the README document included with the nvidia driver.  I am completely stumped. 

Currently I am using 2.6.9-gentoo-r9 for a kernel with the 1.0.6629-r4 version of the nvidia driver.  As I said before I have tried several kernel and driver revisions to no avail.  As a sidebar, 3D performance seems to be as it should be which puzzles me further.  Again, I appreciate any advice anyone may offer.

Please see the following links for the last xorg.conf I tried as well as my kernel config and make.conf

http://pizon.org/xorg.conf
http://pizon.org/kernel-config
http://pizon.org/make.conf