Re: antisocial X11 apps: xtet42, chimera
Bill Mitchell writes:
>
>
> 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.
How does something like netscape run on your machine? I don't see why
xtet would cause this, it's not like it needs to load fonts or use hellish
amounts of ram. It works perfectly on my machine. 486dx2-80 with 16 meg
of RAM and I'm in 10 meg of swap with several rxvt's running, inn, netscape
and quite a few other things and it took about 3 seconds to pop up.
Is your 486 a dx? Do you have any video memory left over for a font cache?
How much RAM do you have? What kind of video card?
Andrew
--
Dehydration - 34%, Recollection of previous evening - 2%, embarrassment
factor - 91%. Advise repair schedule:- off line for 36 hours, re-boot
startup disk, and replace head - wow, what a night!
-- Kryten in Red Dwarf `The Last Day'
Andrew Howell andrew@it.com.au
Perth, Western Australia howellaa@cs.curtin.edu.au
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