[xmonad] urxvt slow rendering

[Richard Watson]

Hello

I've been a long-time xmonad user (over 5 years) on all my machines,
installing using the Debian package.

I'm currently running Debian jessie kernel 3.16 on my main desktop.

Recently I upgraded Debian on my primary desktop (jessie kernel 3.16).
I'm running xmonad v0.11, instead of v0.10 on my other machines.

I notice that when certain GUI application are running (e.g. Chrome,
vmplayer, but not firefox & thunderbird) my urxvt terminal renders
*really* slowly, redrawing the window line at a time! I also notice a
huge X server CPU load (25-50%, as shown by top).

I've looked at X server logs and config and cannot see anything that is
unusual.

Could there be an xmonad issue here? Has anyone else experienced
something similar? Any hints as to how to debug this?

--Richard Watson

[Brandon Allbery]

Post by Richard Watson
I notice that when certain GUI application are running (e.g. Chrome,
vmplayer, but not firefox & thunderbird) my urxvt terminal renders *really*
slowly, redrawing the window line at a time! I also notice a huge X server
CPU load (25-50%, as shown by top).
I've looked at X server logs and config and cannot see anything that is
unusual.
Could there be an xmonad issue here? Has anyone else experienced something
similar? Any hints as to how to debug this?

xmonad has nothing to do with what happens *inside* windows. My gut feeling
would be either xorg video driver regression or (possibly but not likely,
especially since you'd have to have configured one manually) an
underpowered compositor (or one which, again, is interacting poorly with
the xorg video driver).

One thing you might check is if Chrome is using hardware acceleration
(direct GPU access); I've found that both slow and memory-gobbling, at
least with Intel Iris Pro video, and I could see it causing bad
interactions.

[Anthony Brice]

I had a similar problem with urxvt while running xmonad where urxvt would
often not render the last line of output until the terminal received some
input. It turned out I had compton configured incorrectly. I needed to add
the flag --xrender-sync. I don't know if that's your exact problem, but I
hope it helps.

Post by Richard Watson
I notice that when certain GUI application are running (e.g. Chrome,
vmplayer, but not firefox & thunderbird) my urxvt terminal renders *really*
slowly, redrawing the window line at a time! I also notice a huge X server
CPU load (25-50%, as shown by top).
I've looked at X server logs and config and cannot see anything that is
unusual.
Could there be an xmonad issue here? Has anyone else experienced something
similar? Any hints as to how to debug this?
xmonad has nothing to do with what happens *inside* windows. My gut
feeling would be either xorg video driver regression or (possibly but not
likely, especially since you'd have to have configured one manually) an
underpowered compositor (or one which, again, is interacting poorly with
the xorg video driver).
One thing you might check is if Chrome is using hardware acceleration
(direct GPU access); I've found that both slow and memory-gobbling, at
least with Intel Iris Pro video, and I could see it causing bad
interactions.
--
brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad
http://sinenomine.net
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xmonad mailing list
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad

[Brandon Allbery]

Yes, this does sound video driver related. The compton config change is a
workaround; XRender is far from being the ideal backend for compositing
(the glx backend is usually preferred) but in this case the video driver is
apparently not handling it well. In fact this sounds like the bugs I had
using compton+glx under VMware video emulation that went away when I ran
directly on the hardware.

I used to have that problem, turning off terminal transparency helped.
Not a fix but at least a workaround. I suspect the video driver because
it was a change in driver that caused it, if I recall correctly.
Quoting Richard Watson (2017-03-08 03:17:18)

Post by Richard Watson
Hello
I've been a long-time xmonad user (over 5 years) on all my machines,
installing using the Debian package.
I'm currently running Debian jessie kernel 3.16 on my main desktop.
Recently I upgraded Debian on my primary desktop (jessie kernel 3.16).
I'm running xmonad v0.11, instead of v0.10 on my other machines.
I notice that when certain GUI application are running (e.g. Chrome,
vmplayer, but not firefox & thunderbird) my urxvt terminal renders
*really* slowly, redrawing the window line at a time! I also notice a
huge X server CPU load (25-50%, as shown by top).
I've looked at X server logs and config and cannot see anything that is
unusual.
Could there be an xmonad issue here? Has anyone else experienced
something similar? Any hints as to how to debug this?
--Richard Watson
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xmonad mailing list
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad

_______________________________________________
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http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad

[Richard Watson]

Thanks for your responses! Much appreciated.

Regarding compton -- AFAIK I'm not using compton or any compositing
tools. Should I be?

I had suspected that it was some kind of Xorg/video config/interaction.

I'm using the ATI radeon driver (video card is Radeon HD 8490).
with vanilla xorg.conf

Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Driver "fglrx"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Any suggestions of what I should do?
What config files to look at?
Software to install?

--Richard

Post by Brandon Allbery
Yes, this does sound video driver related. The compton config change is
a workaround; XRender is far from being the ideal backend for
compositing (the glx backend is usually preferred) but in this case the
video driver is apparently not handling it well. In fact this sounds
like the bugs I had using compton+glx under VMware video emulation that
went away when I ran directly on the hardware.
I used to have that problem, turning off terminal transparency helped.
Not a fix but at least a workaround. I suspect the video driver because
it was a change in driver that caused it, if I recall correctly.
Quoting Richard Watson (2017-03-08 03:17:18)

Post by Richard Watson
Hello
I've been a long-time xmonad user (over 5 years) on all my machines,
installing using the Debian package.
I'm currently running Debian jessie kernel 3.16 on my main desktop.
Recently I upgraded Debian on my primary desktop (jessie kernel 3.16).
I'm running xmonad v0.11, instead of v0.10 on my other machines.
I notice that when certain GUI application are running (e.g. Chrome,
vmplayer, but not firefox & thunderbird) my urxvt terminal renders
*really* slowly, redrawing the window line at a time! I also notice a
huge X server CPU load (25-50%, as shown by top).
I've looked at X server logs and config and cannot see anything

that is

Post by Richard Watson
unusual.
Could there be an xmonad issue here? Has anyone else experienced
something similar? Any hints as to how to debug this?
--Richard Watson
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xmonad mailing list
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<http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad>
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--
brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net
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[Brandon Allbery]

Post by Richard Watson
Thanks for your responses! Much appreciated.
Regarding compton -- AFAIK I'm not using compton or any compositing tools.
Should I be?

You can try it; sometimes it can work around xorg video driver bugs
(especially with the glx backend), but sometimes it also triggers them or
makes them worse. It does tend to be a good way to smoke out such bugs,
either way.

Unfortunately logs don't help; even with debugging turned on in the X
server, the driver rarely logs anything useful.

[Rasmus Edgar]

Hi Richard,

I experienced something similar with urxvt and xmonad on Archlinux:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=222896

Found out that it was related to how I had defined PROMPT_COMMAND, the
strange thing was, the problem was only present i XMonad.

Br,
Rasmus

Post by Richard Watson
Hello
I've been a long-time xmonad user (over 5 years) on all my machines,
installing using the Debian package.
I'm currently running Debian jessie kernel 3.16 on my main desktop.
Recently I upgraded Debian on my primary desktop (jessie kernel 3.16).
I'm running xmonad v0.11, instead of v0.10 on my other machines.
I notice that when certain GUI application are running (e.g. Chrome,
vmplayer, but not firefox & thunderbird) my urxvt terminal renders
*really* slowly, redrawing the window line at a time! I also notice a
huge X server CPU load (25-50%, as shown by top).
I've looked at X server logs and config and cannot see anything that is
unusual.
Could there be an xmonad issue here? Has anyone else experienced
something similar? Any hints as to how to debug this?
--Richard Watson
_______________________________________________
xmonad mailing list
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad