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Aktau

Member

From: Antwerp, Belgium / BCN, Spain

Registered: 2009-04-04

Posts: 19

Website

Urxvt very slow, xterm pretty fast

Hey there!

Ever since enabling KMS/DRI2/UXA rendering (or so I believe, at the very least I'm quite sure KMS is on, this would imply UXA and that could imply DRI2), I've had a strange terminal problem.

My terminal of choice is urxvt, but nowadays when I turn it on, it redraws itself incredibly slowly. This is for example the most visible when I use htop in urxvt. This first time it has to draw itself, or whenever it has to fully redraw, it's painfully slow. The little differences for memory/cpu updates are ofcourse not that noticeably.

By accident I started an xterm yesterday, and I started htop. I was amazed to find out that it had none of the slow updating problems that urxvt had. As an aside, no other program I've run since then had the slow drawing problem (firefox, geany, emesene, ...).

I'm dying to find out what's causing this, and what the differences in rendering between xterm and urxvt are. Could anyone help me diagnose the problem?

Thanks in advance!

Specs and other:
Pentium M 1.60 Ghz, Intel 915 GM
X.org 1.6, xf86-video-intel from [testing] ofcourse.

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Github: http://github.com/aktau

Maki

Member

From: Skopje, Macedonia

Registered: 2007-10-16

Posts: 353

Website

Re: Urxvt very slow, xterm pretty fast

it could have something to do with urxvt's transpararency code, try some compositing manager and see how will it work

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If it ain't broke, broke it then fix it.

Aktau

Member

From: Antwerp, Belgium / BCN, Spain

Registered: 2009-04-04

Posts: 19

Website

Re: Urxvt very slow, xterm pretty fast

Ok so I enabled compositing in my X server (and started xcompmgr), and it worked flawlessly, now I gotta find a way to disable the transparancy, although I don't immediately see the relevant option in .Xdefaults. Anyway, something else I noticed is a ridiculously high memory usage from xterm. Sometimes when I start up an xterm, I see its mem% in htop at 7%. And my total memory usage jumps from 400 to 500 MB. I googled and found nothing (apparently xterm is supposed to be memory efficient, go figure). Do you know what could possible be going on?

Thanks for the answer and kind regards!

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Github: http://github.com/aktau

johntramp

Member

Registered: 2006-03-02

Posts: 21

Re: Urxvt very slow, xterm pretty fast

I had the same problem. Managed to fix it by changing urxvt.depth: 32 to urxvt.depth: 24 in my .Xdefaults.