antisocial X11 apps: xtet42, chimera

[Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>]

I'm not sure that this behavior is buggy, so I'm not casting this
as a bug report.

I previously reported as a bug that xtet42 hung my system.  That
was dismissed as a probable problem with my system.  I've characterised
this a bit more, and thought I'd report the additional info.

When either xtet42 or chimera are started up on my 486-40 system,
the system appears to hang while these apps are initializing.  During
this period, mouse movement is unrecognized, ctl-alt-F1 and friends
don't work, ctl-alt-backspace doesn't work, and ctl-alt-del doesn't
work.  This condition persists for:

     xtet42:  4 (!!!!) minutes
     Chimera:  eleven (!!!!!!!!!!!) minutes

After this longish time with an apparently hung system, the apps
come up and appear to work normally (though xtet42 is veeeeeeery
slooooooooooow).  It's easy to misread this as a hung system and
hit the reset switch while these apps are starting up.

This only affects X11.  A quick ctl-alt-F1 before the app starts
intializing gets a linux vc which operates normally.  Running
top(1) on the vc, I see X11 taking lots of CPU.  I presume
that non-X users would be undisturbed by this.

I'm wondering if this is (1) normal?  (2) antisocial apps needing 
upstream attention?  (3) something else?

I note that other X11 apps which take a long time to start up don't
appear to hang the system during startup.  Mirrormagic, for example,
takes over a minute to start up, but other X11 operations are able
to continue normally and the ctrl-alt-* commands work OK during its
startup.

mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com (Bill Mitchell)