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PerformanceIssues

How to improve performance.

It can sometimes happen that LyX is sluggish, even on fast systems. Here are a few tips to help you.

You can also look to these bugs, which collects slowness-related bugs in bugzilla, maybe you can get some idea there.

1.  X settings

Try to check who is actually consuming CPU time. When top shows that 90% of CPU time is taken by X and not LyX there is something to be done with your QT & X settings not LyX itself.
If thats the case you can try to switch off Qt hardware-accelerated native backend by running "lyx -graphicssystem raster".

Tips PerformanceIssues ubuntu X xorg

Ubuntu's xorg file often doesn't give X a lot of clues to aid with the above problem. I found that once I added the SubSection to the Screen section in your "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file, performance was definitely better - even on an old PIII laptop.

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection      "Display"
                Depth           24
                Modes           "1280x1024"
                Virtual         2048 2048
        EndSubSection
EndSection

2.  Outliner & Latex source window

In some cases Outliner or Latex source windows can be the culprit, try to switch them off.

3.  Lyx 1.6 and Nvidia cards

Nvidia cards do not always play with the QT4.4 libraries.
Use: nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

4.  Slow graphics

Sometimes simply reducing the size of the LyX window can improve performance. In some cases, switching to 'console mode' (i.e. Ctrl+Alt+F1) and back to X (Ctrl+Alt+F7(or F8 or F9, depending..)) might help (credit due to this launchpad bug comment).

5.  Clipboard issues (1.6.x, haven't seen in 2.0 so far)

When cursor movement is too slow, try copy&paste of some text into the clipboard. (There seems to be some delay penalty in clipboard querying in strange circumstances. Pusing new things into clipboard fix the issue magically.)

6.  Math toolbars

When using a lot of math, try turning the math toolbars on rather than letting them blink on and off automatically. This seems to help a drop, as well as reducing distractions.

Performance Tips