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brianb

Member

From: Montreal, QC

Registered: 2012-02-17

Posts: 81

Website

alsamixer is slow to draw screen

Hi,

Recently, alsamixer takes a much longer time to draw the screen than usual. It looks similar to downloading a browser image on a slow internet connection, drawing it from top to bottom. It takes about 1-2 seconds to draw the whole thing, rather than instantaneously. Since I adjust my volume using a keybinding that opens alsamixer, this is a problem for me.

Some other things:

- ctrl-L (redraw screen) has the same lag
- it also does it when I go back to a previously hidden window containing alsamixer
- no other ncurses programs seem to be affected (mutt, ncmpcpp, wicd-curses, etc.)

If it helps, I'm on a pretty new Lenovo x140e, with:

% lspci | grep VGA                                                                                          ~
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini [Radeon HD 8330]

Also, I've only used one version of alsa-utils (which provides alsamixer) since I've owned this machine.

% ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ | grep alsa
alsa-lib-1.0.28-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
alsa-plugins-1.0.28-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
alsa-utils-1.0.28-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
lib32-alsa-lib-1.0.28-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
pulseaudio-alsa-2-3-any.pkg.tar.xz

alsamixer worked fine for a while then suddenly this problem began. I wish I could pin it to an update or install of something, but I have no idea.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

Brian

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,722

Re: alsamixer is slow to draw screen

How are you starting alsamixer?  Try running it from a terminal and see if it is spewing any error messages.

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brianb

Member

From: Montreal, QC

Registered: 2012-02-17

Posts: 81

Website

Re: alsamixer is slow to draw screen

I run alsamixer from a terminal each time. (It's an ncurses program, so I don't think there's any other way.) There are no errors.

However, interestingly, I've discovered that it spawns just fine in xterm (and in a tty). I use rxvt-unicode-patched from AUR. So maybe it's a urxvt thing.

(It also seems to be font-independent, as the issue arises both with inconsolata and with terminus.)

Last edited by brianb (2014-08-16 00:48:25)

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: alsamixer is slow to draw screen

-sbg
    Compile frills: Disable the usage of the built-in block graphics/line drawing characters and just rely on what
    the specified fonts provide. Use this if you have a good font and want to use its block graphic glyphs;
    resource skipBuiltinGlyphs.

So, start urxvt with the following and see if that fixes things up:

urxvt -sbg

If it works with your font, then by adding this to .Xresources makes it permanent:

URxvt*skipBuiltinGlyphs:    true

I can now run xprop and not make dinner before the output finished rendering.

** EDIT **

I forgot to mention that this does seem to be related to the open source radeon driver as was suggested earlier. The older Intel based laptop that I have does not have this problem.

Last edited by skottish (2014-12-30 02:29:14)