On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 9:17 PM, Richard Watson <rwatson@imap.cc> wrote:

I notice that when certain GUI application are running (e.g. Chrome, vmplayer, but not firefox & thunderbird) my urxvt terminal renders *really* slowly, redrawing the window line at a time! I also notice a huge X server CPU load (25-50%, as shown by top).

I've looked at X server logs and config and cannot see anything that is unusual.

Could there be an xmonad issue here? Has anyone else experienced something similar? Any hints as to how to debug this?

xmonad has nothing to do with what happens *inside* windows. My gut feeling would be either xorg video driver regression or (possibly but not likely, especially since you'd have to have configured one manually) an underpowered compositor (or one which, again, is interacting poorly with the xorg video driver).

One thing you might check is if Chrome is using hardware acceleration (direct GPU access); I've found that both slow and memory-gobbling, at least with Intel Iris Pro video, and I could see it causing bad interactions.

brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates

allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net

unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net