On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 10:07:30AM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote: > Neil Youngman wrote: > > It can take several seconds to pop up a menu and, in the worst case, > > swapping from one window to another can take minutes, even if the > > other window is a simple xterm. I have also observed windows being > > redrawn so slowly that you can can see the rendering creeping slowly > > down the screen. I think that this all indicates that the graphics > > is the root of the problem. > > To me this suggests that you have a process that is consuming all of > your memory. This is causing your system to swap. I've been seeing a lot of random freezes on a number of Debian systems (testing and unstable) over the last few months. Resources shouldn't be an issue--one is a quad core system with 8GiB memory and very fast discs. But I regularly see X programs freezing for tens of seconds, even in konsole and konqueror and even kwin refusing to allow window switching with the entire desktop locked up. GNOME is no better. On one system part of the problem was a fault on an NFS filesystem (blocking on writes for up to 5 mins due to an issue with the SAN hardware), but I still get the random regular freezes for tens of seconds even with this rectified. One thing I think causes issues is the sheer amount of crap current desktop applications feel the need to write. On a moderately busy system they are continually blocking on writes due to writing out their state each time I move the mouse! [only slightly exaggerated] Useless! I'm also suspicious of things like dbus. When the entire desktop freezes, is some shared service like this causing every program to block for some reason? Given the intermittent nature of things going wrong, it's difficult to trace or debug effectively. Simpler programs don't appear to suffer-- I've never seen xterm freeze up like konsole, but then it never writes out /any/ state at any time (as one might reasonably expect from a terminal emulator). The performance of modern desktop environments is I think a major issue, and I think that the main causes are very likely extremely simple to fix, especially if it's down to doing blocking writes at inappropriate times. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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