Re: Slow ETerms

[Ross Burton <ross.burton@mail.com>]

On Wed, 2001-11-07 at 15:21, DvB wrote:
> > Is anyone else seeing this?  On my Debian unstable system when I start
> > an Eterm there is a pause of 2 or so seconds before the window is
> > usable.  At work under RH62 and a machine of similar speed an Eterm pops
> > up in 1/2 second.  I ran strace on Eterm and found that Eterm spent most
> > of its time waiting for information from the font server.

> AFAIK, you don't have to run the font server with X4.1 (not sure about
> 4.0) so you might try disabling it (not sure how you'd do that
> exactly... try searching google for a howto or something).

I am not running the external X font server, I am using the core X4
modules.

I have recreated the strace file and dug around:

socket(PF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, 0)         = 3
connect(3, {sin_family=AF_UNIX, path="/tmp/.X11-unix/X0"}, 19) = 0
...
A few pages later there are hundreds (well, maybe not quite that many,
but lots) of readv(3, ...) calls which return "-1 EAGAIN (Resource
temporarily unavailable)".  I this this is what is causing the
slowdown.  Does anyone know why this is?  I guess that socket is used to
talk to the X server.  However, the protocol appears to be binary not
textual (fair enough) so I have no idea what exactly is causing the
slowdown.  Is there a way I can profile the server end of the
connection. or any other way of determining the problem?

Thanks for any help,
Ross Burton