F13: Delay in screen refresh

Mike Fleetwood mike.fleetwood at googlemail.com
Mon May 31 08:51:13 UTC 2010


On 31 May 2010 09:02, Marco Guazzone <marco.guazzone at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Marco Guazzone
> <marco.guazzone at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've noticed that there is a some kind of "delay" in the screen refresh.
>> For instance, under VIM when I move the cursor (that is a black
>> rectangle) under a character,  it takes between 1 and 4 secs before
>> the character appears inside the cursor.
>> I've experienced the same issue under OpenOffice and FireFox.
>> This is really annoying. :(
>>
>> Under F12 no problem
>>
>> Does any other experienced this behaviour?
>>
>> My system is:
>> * OS: F13 x86_64 - up-to-dated
>> * WM: OpenBox
>> * CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo
>> * GPU: Intel GM965/GL960
>> * RAM: 2GB
>>
>> Thank you so much!
>
> Hi!
>
> It seems that this problem is only affecting me.
>
> In the meanwhile I've noticed that this delay seems to be really X
> dependent, since almost every applications exhibits it.
> For instance, I've tried with:
> * bash inside xterm (e.g., execute "ls" and then move up with Shift+PgUp)
> * gvim
> ...
>
> Please, can anyone help me?
>
> Thank you very much!!
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- Marco

Hi Marco,

I'm no expert but it sound to me like you have a latency issue.  For
some reason your machine is sometimes having to wait 1 to 4 seconds
before it can give a program (vim, bash, etc.) its CPU time slice,
hence the apparent delay.

I have seen this kind of thing before when the kernel has to re-try
disk I/O multiple times on a failing hard drive.

Suggestions:
1) Play music!  If it pauses when your app pauses it is an OS wide
issue effecting everything.
2) Run top in another window.  When top refreshes after the pause does
any process jump to the top?
3) Check /var/log/messages for any errors.

Vague ideas:
4) Google for investigating latency issues.
5) With modern kernels I guess it should be possible to dynamically
trace it to find the lateny issue, but I have no idea how.

Sorry I can't be more help,
Mike


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