I had a similar problem with urxvt while running xmonad where urxvt would often not render the last line of output until the terminal received some input. It turned out I had compton configured incorrectly. I needed to add the flag --xrender-sync. I don't know if that's your exact problem, but I hope it helps. On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 6:34 PM Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 9:17 PM, Richard Watson 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 _______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad

Yes, this does sound video driver related. The compton config change is a workaround; XRender is far from being the ideal backend for compositing (the glx backend is usually preferred) but in this case the video driver is apparently not handling it well. In fact this sounds like the bugs I had using compton+glx under VMware video emulation that went away when I ran directly on the hardware. On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 5:34 AM, vrs wrote:

I used to have that problem, turning off terminal transparency helped. Not a fix but at least a workaround. I suspect the video driver because it was a change in driver that caused it, if I recall correctly.

Quoting Richard Watson (2017-03-08 03:17:18)

...

Hello

I've been a long-time xmonad user (over 5 years) on all my machines, installing using the Debian package.

I'm currently running Debian jessie kernel 3.16 on my main desktop.

Recently I upgraded Debian on my primary desktop (jessie kernel 3.16). I'm running xmonad v0.11, instead of v0.10 on my other machines.

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?

--Richard Watson _______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad

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xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmonad

-- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net

On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 10:49 PM, Richard Watson wrote:

Thanks for your responses! Much appreciated.

Regarding compton -- AFAIK I'm not using compton or any compositing tools. Should I be?

You can try it; sometimes it can work around xorg video driver bugs (especially with the glx backend), but sometimes it also triggers them or makes them worse. It does tend to be a good way to smoke out such bugs, either way. Unfortunately logs don't help; even with debugging turned on in the X server, the driver rarely logs anything useful. -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net