Arch Linux

CalcAndCoffee

Member

From: New York, NY

Registered: 2009-02-23

Posts: 51

Website

urxvt(c) slow to open

I don't remember exactly when it happened, but urxvtc on my system has become extremely slow.  Opening a new window has gone from near-instant to 2-3 seconds.

Below are the times to run urxvtc and urxvt (from the stock Arch package and with all fancy customizations disabled), with xterm included for reference.

$ time urxvtc -e 'return'
urxvtc -e 'return'  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 2.671 total

$ time urxvt -e 'return'
urxvt -e 'return'  0.07s user 0.01s system 2% cpu 3.275 total

$ time xterm -e 'return'
xterm -e 'return'  0.01s user 0.02s system 20% cpu 0.128 total

With one urxvtc open, running a second is a little faster, but still perceptibly slow:

$ time urxvtc ; time urxvtc
urxvtc  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 2.696 total
urxvtc  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 1.224 total

The problem has been consistent for at least a month with up-to-date packages, and I've just been avoiding it by using yakuake and xterm.  I'd quite like to have my good ol' urxvt back, though.

If it helps at all, the hardware is a Thinkpad T61p with an NVidia card. I'm using the nvidia drivers, but I think the problem was there with nouveau, too.  If it would actually help at all, I'll be happy to verify that.

harryNID

Member

From: P3X-1971

Registered: 2009-06-12

Posts: 117

Re: urxvt(c) slow to open

Had something like this happen to me recently. It would take 2-5 seconds to open initially but only the first time after boot. If I opened it up again then it was snappy. What was weird it was only doing it while I was logged on as root. My issue turned out to be my .bashrc (which I kinda figured because of the symptoms I mentioned). Make sure your .bash* files are syntactically correct!

An example (actually the problem I had. Notice the keyword "logged on as root" which helped me to narrow it to an alias I only used as root):

Wrong!

alias pacor="pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)"

Right!

alias pacor='pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)'

In the "Wrong" example I was using double-quotes which allows substitution. This caused command substitution to occur when .bashrc was called the first time around. By using single-quotes instead, command substitution could not be preformed so no slowdown in start-up.

I'm not saying this is your issue but I would defiantly take a look at you .bash* files. It could be just something simple like I had.

Hope this helps somewhat!!

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In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.  --Sherlock Holmes

CalcAndCoffee

Member

From: New York, NY

Registered: 2009-02-23

Posts: 51

Website

Re: urxvt(c) slow to open

Had something like this happen to me recently. It would take 2-5 seconds to open initially but only the first time after boot. If I opened it up again then it was snappy. What was weird it was only doing it while I was logged on as root. My issue turned out to be my .bashrc (which I kinda figured because of the symptoms I mentioned). Make sure your .bash* files are syntactically correct!

Thanks for the suggestion.  Unfortunately, this isn't the problem.  Other terminals (like xterm) start just fine with my zsh setup, and urxvt remains slow regardless of what shell is used.

goodgrue

Member

From: CA, USA

Registered: 2008-11-19

Posts: 41

Re: urxvt(c) slow to open

Here's another "I had a similar problem, maybe it's related" post:

I just had an issue where urxvt(c) wouldn't open at all. In my case, my problem was in .Xdefaults -- apparently the line

urxvt.borderLess:      true 

causes urxvt to choke and die.  I commented it out and everything went back to normal.

Interestingly, even while urxvt was broken urxvt-tabbed worked just fine, so even if we have different problems you might try that as a sort of workaround.  Good luck troubleshooting!

Last edited by goodgrue (2010-10-26 00:54:07)

fbcon

Member

Registered: 2011-06-18

Posts: 3

Re: urxvt(c) slow to open

Specify the imFont paramter. URxvt will use a very generic pattern to search for fonts if not specified when initializing XIM, as is written in urxvt(1):

The default will be set-up to chose *any* suitable found found, preferably one or two pixels differing in size to the base font.

Generic querying on a huge font database takes long time. You can verify this with ltrace (XCreateFontSet() taking long time).

Or you can --disable-xim.

exaos

Member

Registered: 2012-03-18

Posts: 17

Re: urxvt(c) slow to open

Thanks a lot! I encounter this problem. So I switch to uxterm.

freaker

Member

Registered: 2014-07-26

Posts: 1

Website

Re: urxvt(c) slow to open

I experienced the very same problem as OP: urxvt would take 2.5-3sec to start, no matter what. After some testing I found out the problem was caused by my locale. My user's locale was set to de_DE.UTF8. However, running urxvt with

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF8 urxvt

fixed it. urxvt would immediately open a new console. I'm not sure what exactly causes the long delay with a different locale but switching to en_US.UTF8 solved the problem for me.

fsckd

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-06-15

Posts: 4,173

Re: urxvt(c) slow to open

Hi freaker, welcome to the forum. Please start a new thread for your problem. Forum Etquette: Old Threads / Necro-Bumping; closing.
Good luck!

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