Removing Zeitgeist Sped Up Unity

So I went through and started removing a ton of packages from my Ubuntu install. I use a SSD so I wanted to be sure I had as much space as possible.

I was shocked when I restarted and Unity was so much faster. Unity’s always pretty quick for me but when opening the Dashboard it was a bit choppy. I had attributed this to poor ATI drivers. Apparently I was wrong.

It was actually Zeitgeist. I removed it and now the panel opens up in a smooth and quick manner. It’s incredible that it had such a significant impact on performance without me realizing it. It was likely a bug, maybe even specific to my system, but removal meant opening the Dash with video in the background no longer slowed my system to a crawl.

So that’s goodbye to Zeigeist forever – never needed it anyways. If you’re looking to speed up Unity I suggest the same.

Performance in Ubuntu still isn’t perfect but ATI drivers have been improving.

For those looking to speed up Unity on ATI cards you may want to try

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Then go to the CCSM and the OpenGL plugin and disable “Sync to Vblank”. Go back to CCSM and then the Composite plugin. This time disable the “Check refresh rate”. Apparently this is supposed to improve performance in Unity on ATI cards – I’ve yet to give it a try.