URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

kosmiciatakuja · 2010-03-26 13:45:31

Hi,

I started using URxvt recently and I love it, especially the tabbed add-on. There's just one problem - with intensive use, after an hour or two it gets very slow in refreshing when switching between tabs or just using it. I mean the text redraw takes a while, like half a second, which is annoying when switching between many tabs.
Now I know xft is supposted to be slow and I'm using it, but I have a core 2 duo 2.33GHz CPU so I thought maybe it can handle xft... And it does, just after restart it works just faaaaast. But after an hour or so it's slow, and later it's even slower.
What is also interesting is that sometimes just resizing the window helps, like making it just a tad smaller, or even bigger. But after a couple resizes even that doesn't help.

So, is it xft that's getting slower and slower with use?
I also use the nvidia proprietary driver and I heard that causes problems, so could that be it?

Apart from that, I use kde 4.4. URxvt is 9.07 and nvidia is 195.36.03.

As for disabling xft: I'm currently using Code Envy R font and I love it, so if I can just keep using it without xft (can i?) then that's okay, otherwise I'd like to stick to xft if at all possible....

Does that happen to anybody else? What do you think may be the problem?

Thanks!

skottish · 2010-03-27 01:15:03

I spend more than half of my time in urxvt using xft with the nvidia drivers and never experience what you're talking about. Although, I don't use urxvt tabbed. Does htop, top, ps, or any other monitoring tool show any process out of control?

jasonwryan · 2010-03-27 01:21:36

Are you running it as a daemon: urxvtd and then spawning instances of urxvtc?

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2009/08/25 … nd-urxvtc/

skottish · 2010-03-27 01:31:05

jasonwryan wrote:

Are you running it as a daemon: urxvtd and then spawning instances of urxvtc?
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2009/08/25 … nd-urxvtc/

Great post. I should have mentioned that's how I'm running.

jasonwryan · 2010-03-27 05:37:18

Cheers: from someone with +6k, that has to count...

kosmiciatakuja - with all that tabbing, you should probably take a look at tmux (or screen if you are old-school)...

skottish · 2010-03-28 04:39:22

jasonwryan wrote:

Cheers: from someone with +6k, that has to count...

+6k can be a sign of caffeine abuse and not necessarily of skill level...

kosmiciatakuja,

Are you still working on this? urxvt should perform excellently on most machines, so it feels like that you have another problem.

kosmiciatakuja · 2010-03-28 11:21:55

Thanks everybody for all the suggestions. I have checked htop, atop and iotop to ensure nothing is eating my resources. The CPU is free, disk is free and most of memory is as well (I have 3gig so it's plenty). I'm not running in daemon mode and the slowing down is mostly visible when switching tabs so maybe that's it.
I'm familiar with tmux, thanks for the suggestion too, but I still can't get used to it's shortcuts. I like urxvt simple shift-left and shift-right to switch tabs. Maybe I can just reconfigure tmux hotkeys... I'll certainly go that way if I fail with getting urxvt to work properly but there's still a couple of things to try.

I'll try the daemon/client mode of urxvt and I'm also currently trying mrxvt with UTF-8 patch from aur, so far it works good but I need to put it to much more use before I can say it's really fast.

I understand urxvt should run fine on my machine, that's why I was really surprised when I noticed the slow downs. I suspected nvidia because they had some issues in the past with anti-aliased fonts, but seems like it was in the past. One thing's for sure - it made konsole really slow in some configurations. So I thought maybe urxvt is affected by that as well, but if it works for other people then I guess it's something else.

Thanks for all the suggestions everybody!

Last edited by kosmiciatakuja (2010-03-28 11:22:18)

eirika · 2010-03-28 13:44:36

You are not alone. I used rxvt-unicode long ago with nvidia driver and AA fonts.
I experienced exactly the same problem as you said. However that problem
went away at some point. Probably after I switched to a bitmap font. But I never
tried to solve the problem so I can't tell.

PS: I don't use urxvtd/urxvtc.

Last edited by eirika (2010-03-28 13:51:18)

Knute · 2010-03-28 15:21:04

If you think xft is causing your issues, use the non xft format for the font, and see if that helps.

kosmiciatakuja · 2010-03-28 18:02:09

Yes, I thought of just switching away from xft, but I'm not sure I understand how this works. Is xft for ttf/vector type fonts and if I switch it of, can I only use bitmap fonts? Or can I somehow use vector fonts (like Envy Code R that I'm using) without xft?

jasonwryan · 2010-03-28 18:48:56

I use xft fonts (Envy Code R & Inconsolata) and Urxvt as a daemon with no performance issues. I'd try that if you want to stick with Envy...

Knute · 2010-03-28 22:53:47

kosmiciatakuja wrote:

Yes, I thought of just switching away from xft, but I'm not sure I understand how this works. Is xft for ttf/vector type fonts and if I switch it of, can I only use bitmap fonts? Or can I somehow use vector fonts (like Envy Code R that I'm using) without xft?

It's a different way of notating the font that you want.

If you want to see the format, use xfontsel That will let you see what the different options are, and when you get the font that you want, you can simply copy it straight out of the app and then paste it right into your Xdefaults file.

xfontsel, however, has a limited supply of sizes, so there is some adjustments necessary to get exactly what you want, but it's easier than trying to set it up yourself.

For the font that you want it would be:

-*-envy code r-*-*-*-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Each asterisk stands for a default value, and 17 is the size. There are values for all kinds of things, and they are labeled in xfontsel.

HTH

kosmiciatakuja · 2010-03-29 09:53:41

Wow, thanks Knute, I'll try that, this was exactly what I needed to know!

kosmiciatakuja · 2010-03-30 08:44:33

okay, reporting back, so far two failures. First, not using xft somehow doesn't work, I selected the font using xfontsel and urxvt complains about the font like this:

urxvt: -misc-envy code r-bold-r-normal--17-123-100-100-m-0-adobe-standard: cannot deduce encoding from registry/encoding properties "adobe-standard", ignoring font.

Here's the relevant line from .Xdefaults:

URxvt.font: -*-envy code r-*-*-*-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Also, using urxvtd (daemon mode) makes no change because I only run one window of urxvt and multiple tabs inside, and it that case (checked this with ps and htop) only one instance of urxvt runs, no matter if it's a daemon or client or standalone mode. It only spawns shells as I add tabs.

One thing I noticed is if the window is really small (like 40x80 chars) then it's much faster, but if I make it large, close to full screen it gets slow very quickly and it is very very slow then.

jasonwryan · 2010-03-30 08:57:39

You could try with my .Xdefaults font settings - as they work for me without issue:

! -- Xft settings -- !
Xft.dpi:        96
Xft.antialias:  true
Xft.rgba:       rgb
Xft.hinting:    true
Xft.hinstyle:   hintslight
! -- Fonts -- !
URxvt.font:xft:envy code r:medium:pixelsize=12
URxvt.boldFont:xft:envy code r:medium:pixelsize=12

#edit Mind you, you should consider using antialias: false as the wiki suggests: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Urx … erformance

Last edited by jasonwryan (2010-03-30 08:59:32)

litemotiv · 2010-04-16 22:47:50

jasonwryan wrote:

You could try with my .Xdefaults font settings - as they work for me without issue:
! -- Xft settings -- !
Xft.dpi:        96
Xft.antialias:  true
Xft.rgba:       rgb
Xft.hinting:    true
Xft.hinstyle:   hintslight
! -- Fonts -- !
URxvt.font:xft:envy code r:medium:pixelsize=12
URxvt.boldFont:xft:envy code r:medium:pixelsize=12
#edit Mind you, you should consider using antialias: false as the wiki suggests: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Urx … erformance

i get really big horizontal spacing between letters when i use Envy (some other fonts too), don't you experience that?

skottish · 2010-04-17 01:56:37

litemotiv wrote:

jasonwryan wrote:
You could try with my .Xdefaults font settings - as they work for me without issue:
! -- Xft settings -- !
Xft.dpi:        96
Xft.antialias:  true
Xft.rgba:       rgb
Xft.hinting:    true
Xft.hinstyle:   hintslight
! -- Fonts -- !
URxvt.font:xft:envy code r:medium:pixelsize=12
URxvt.boldFont:xft:envy code r:medium:pixelsize=12
#edit Mind you, you should consider using antialias: false as the wiki suggests: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Urx … erformance
i get really big horizontal spacing between letters when i use Envy (some other fonts too), don't you experience that?

That's a topic for another thread.

unexist · 2010-04-28 17:04:12

kosmiciatakuja wrote:

okay, reporting back, so far two failures. First, not using xft somehow doesn't work, I selected the font using xfontsel and urxvt complains about the font like this:
urxvt: -misc-envy code r-bold-r-normal--17-123-100-100-m-0-adobe-standard: cannot deduce encoding from registry/encoding properties "adobe-standard", ignoring font.
Here's the relevant line from .Xdefaults:
URxvt.font: -*-envy code r-*-*-*-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Also, using urxvtd (daemon mode) makes no change because I only run one window of urxvt and multiple tabs inside, and it that case (checked this with ps and htop) only one instance of urxvt runs, no matter if it's a daemon or client or standalone mode. It only spawns shells as I add tabs.
One thing I noticed is if the window is really small (like 40x80 chars) then it's much faster, but if I make it large, close to full screen it gets slow very quickly and it is very very slow then.

I had the same issues, you can easily fix it by choosing an encoding to the font string like iso8859 e.g.:

-*-envy code r-medium-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*

cf8 · 2010-06-04 07:20:22

Just try adding:

URxvt*buffered:false

into your .Xdefaults. This helps me

jfhall · 2010-06-09 03:34:57

cf8 wrote:

Just try adding:
URxvt*buffered:false
into your .Xdefaults. This helps me

That fixed it!
I've been dealing with this for a while, thanks for posting this!

yiuin · 2011-04-13 22:25:01

cf8, you are the man. I've had the problem on an off for at least a year. Hopefully this fix lasts.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-03-26 13:45:31

URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#2 2010-03-27 01:15:03

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#3 2010-03-27 01:21:36

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#4 2010-03-27 01:31:05

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#5 2010-03-27 05:37:18

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#6 2010-03-28 04:39:22

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#7 2010-03-28 11:21:55

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#8 2010-03-28 13:44:36

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#9 2010-03-28 15:21:04

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#10 2010-03-28 18:02:09

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#11 2010-03-28 18:48:56

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#12 2010-03-28 22:53:47

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#13 2010-03-29 09:53:41

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#14 2010-03-30 08:44:33

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#15 2010-03-30 08:57:39

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#16 2010-04-16 22:47:50

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#17 2010-04-17 01:56:37

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#18 2010-04-28 17:04:12

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#19 2010-06-04 07:20:22

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#20 2010-06-09 03:34:57

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

#21 2011-04-13 22:25:01

Re: URxvt getting slower with use - is it xft or nvidia binary driver?

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