[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#453266: Bug#453266: xfce4-terminal: text displays slowly and hogs CPU in some tabs and instances

[agcosta at gis.net (A. Costa)]

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:37:02 +0100
Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at corsac.net> wrote:

> Could you test ? by hand ? ...gnome-terminal...

Have done so but the results seem inconclusive.  I get results that
for 'seq 1000000' range over {9,14,15,46,52} seconds real time.  I
opened about 50 tabs, that was the '14'.

Note that I had background processes going at the time, which might
account for it, but maybe not.  Anyway, none of these runs compared
to the 'xfce4-terminal' slowness.

I haven't seen the 'xfce4-terminal' slowness in the last few days.

Retesting today... new instance, 1st tab 84s, run again 81s, 2nd tab
89s.  Takes too long, I'll knock off a '0'.  ' seq 100000' 2nd tab 9s,
9s, 9s; back to first 9s, 9s; hmmm, opened 50 tabs, 50th tab 39s, 37s;
try another 50, 100th tab slow at first but sped up -- 9s, 9s, 8s...
that starting slowness, if I do 'seq 10000' it takes 6s,8s,6s,6s,5s,6s,
adding a zero, back to 9s.  Add a zero, 19s,20s,22s,17s.

The 6s for the 'seq 10000' in tab 100 looks like the kind of thing I had 
before.  

Tried tab 2 'seq 10000' in GnTerm again, 10s,0.7s,0.7s,0.7s.  Tab 50
8s,8s,7s,9s. Opening tab 100 9s,4s,4s; try 'seq 100000', 8s,10s,7s.

In a nutshell, with many tabs, I see that the output speed of 'seq' is
not a flat line... it begins slowly then speeds up, by the looks of it
there seems to be two speeds or "gears", low gear 'seq 10000' 6s
(=~1800per/sec), high gear 999000 in 19-6=13s (=~.77000p/s).

> > > Do you have compositor deactivated in xorg? In xfwm?
> > 
> > I'm not sure, how do I check those?
> > 
> 
> On recent xorg you need to explicitely deactivate compositing, with:
> 
> ----8<----
> Section "Extensions"
> 	Option "Composite" "disable"
> EndSection
> ---->8----

	% grep Composite /etc/X11/xorg.conf ; echo $?
	1

It is and was enabled.

> On xfwm you need to check in Settings Manager, Window Manager tweaks,
> tab ? compositing ? (wont be there if compositing is disabled in
> xorg).

Well the 'compositing' tab exists and under it there's an unchecked box
"Enable display compositing".  It still needs to be off in X then?
Either way I'll test it soon... (but can't right now).

HTH...

PS: is there a way to automate opening a lot of tabs from the command
line and adding a command?  That is, a way to tell the terminal "open
a window, then open 50 tabs, and in the 50th run 'foo'".  'expect' could
probably do it, but maybe there's some other way.