Slow login with GDM

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1

For a while now I’ve had an extreme delay between logging in from GDM and entering gnome-shell. I do not get this issue with XFCE or logging in via the tty. And it happens whether it’s on Wayland or X11. Upon logging in, the screen shows the last thing on the buffer (i.e, the distro logo or the tty screen), then after 15-30 seconds, it finally gets into gnome-shell. I’ve attached a log. Notice that there’s a time jump here:

Aug 27 01:20:03 localhost gdm-wayland-session[2755]: Gdm: gdm-wayland-session: Session will register itself
Aug 27 01:20:24 localhost gnome-shell[2890]: Registering session with GDM

I’ve attached a separate log for what happens between those timestamps. It still occurs even when I uninstall/reinstall the NVIDIA drivers and GDM, gnome-shell et al. and have tried disabling various services, but I do not think it’s a boot time issue, but GDM/graphics card issue.

gdm.txt
journal.txt
fpaste

2

I see a lot of activity in journalctl between 01:20:03 and 01:20:24 and it is not related to GDM.

I would look at what is happening in that time period and see why the 21 second delay is occurring there. I do not believe it is either the graphics driver or GDM that is causing the delay. (GDM seems to be waiting for other things to finish up.)

3

It looks like sssd might be enabled. It’s possible that the slow login might be due to LDAP if it’s a directory based login via sssd.

4

I would look at what is happening in that time period and see why the 21 second delay is occurring there. I do not believe it is either the graphics driver or GDM that is causing the delay.

I do not see anything there that stands out (or at least I shouldn’t have to disable on a “default” install).

It looks like sssd might be enabled. It’s possible that the slow login might be due to LDAP if it’s a directory based login via sssd.

I do not use LDAP or Kerberos, disabled it and still have the issue though. I’ve also disabled the following based on other threads:

lvm2-monitor
systemd-udev-settle
NetworkManager-wait-online

Tried disabling dnscrypt-proxy as well. Regardless, while it seems to speed up my boot time, I don’t think it’s affecting GDM to gnome-shell start. Anything I should look for specifically?

5

Each time you make a change you should go back and look at the logs to see what effect the change had. If none or miniscule then that change was unnecessary and should be reverted before doing another change.

Doing a blanket change of several things at once, even if it has the desired result, leaves one wondering exactly which affected the outcome, and how much.

6

What makes you assume I haven’t? I use etckeeper to track changes to /etc and systemd-analyze as well as systemctl status, journalctl, etc. to see what impact it has.

Either way, I did a reinstall and the issue is still present, which makes me think it might be a hardware issue. I just haven’t narrowed down the component.

7

Your lack of comment how it was done.

8

Compared to XFCE, GNOME will always be slower. GNOME requires a lot of raw computer power to run halfway decent. A lot of ram and a SSD disk helps a lot. AS GDM is almost a full blown GNOME session, it is slow as well.

9

Compared to XFCE, GNOME will always be slower. GNOME requires a lot of raw computer power to run halfway decent. A lot of ram and a SSD disk helps a lot. AS GDM is almost a full blown GNOME session, it is slow as well.

I have Fedora installed on a SSD, a 7700k, GTX 1060 and 16 GB of RAM. Hardware is about 5 years old, but GNOME itself runs decent.

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