Bug 497424 – x11-terms/xfce4-terminal-0.6.3: a task running in an out-of-focus tab exhibits abnormal CPU load

• Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description sphakka 2014-01-07 18:25:35 UTC]

Created attachment 367314 [details]
emerge --info

I'm seeing a strange behaviour with x11-terms/xfce4-terminal-0.4.8: whenever a task runs in an out-of-focus tab of the same terminal window, its CPU load is much higher wrt to the load it has when its tab is in focus. 

Always reproducible. Steps:

1) open at least two tabs in a Terminal;
2) start a task on one tab with enough load to see it in a meter like gkrellm, f.i.:

'$ while true; do echo -ne "blah blah blah blah\r"; done'

(depending on the CPU power and message length, the mileage may vary)

3) observe the CPU load increasing when the tab is switched.

My system is dual-core. Terminal is configured with a a Terminus font and aliasing disabled. I use x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers with xorg-server-1.14.3-r2 on a GeForce Go 6150 GPU.

The same test with mrxvt shows no load difference when the tab is switched. I also don't remember of having ever seen this problem on a KDE Terminal, but can't test now as I sanitized my system time ago.

[Comment 1 Samuli Suominen (RETIRED) 2014-06-20 13:22:10 UTC]

Try with 0.6.3. Switch the bug back to *CONFIRMED if the problem persists (as in, reopen the bug)

[Comment 2 sphakka 2014-06-28 15:46:09 UTC]

The problem persists with v0.6.3: with the same test as in comment #0, I still experience a 30-40% load increase...

[Comment 3 Samuli Suominen (RETIRED) 2014-06-28 16:18:54 UTC]

Then you should report it to http://bugzilla.xfce.org/ with meaningul valgrind data.

[Comment 4 Jason Zaman 2015-07-05 09:50:59 UTC]

Has this been reported upstream? Can you add the link to the upstream bug to "See Also"?

[Comment 5 sphakka 2015-07-06 13:34:30 UTC]

No upstream report so far. What's best practice for that? Copy + paste my original report or just linking to this report?

[Comment 6 Jason Zaman 2015-07-06 14:19:20 UTC]

(In reply to sphakka from comment #5)
> No upstream report so far. What's best practice for that? Copy + paste my
> original report or just linking to this report?

It is usually best to re-submit the data to their bugtracker. This is the kind of issue that needs to be fixed upstream so they should have the full report. I'm sure they will ask for more info too. (feel free to link to this bug report too tho)
Then once there is an upstream release that fixes the issue, we'll re-open this bug and add the new version.

[Comment 7 sphakka 2015-07-08 17:07:46 UTC]

Added link to the upstream bug.