On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:52 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
I wonder whether this is the same momentary-loss-of-focus issue that I've been griping of for awhile. I don't use full-screen mode but the loss of a few keystrokes seems about the same. I've been able to correlate some of the events with iCal alarms (they consistently happen 1 minute before an iCal alarm is due) and I suspect that Time Machine wakeups may cause it too.
Hi Tom -- nice to see you here -- it's a small planet! It may be the same issue, or it may be part of a more general issue, I suspect. I'm not receiving alerts from Time Machine (the external disk is not connected), and I have no alarms set in iCal, and I have not so far lost a keystroke, but I often lose pointer events when I draw in gimp. That shows as gaps in continuous lines. Sometimes, there's just a delay (the line remains continuous, but the rendering is delayed) but more often, it's a total loss of events -- sometimes up to 1/2-second's worth of stylus motion is not reported to gimp. That is not as disastrous as when your command is truncated to 'rm -rf /', but annoying nonetheless. I couldn't correlate that wit anything outside X11, but I often hear the disk head jolt at the same time when my stylus events are stolen. But it does seem to correlate with another annoying artifact we've been discussing. I don't have enough data to make any inference, but already 5 times during a short session, the drop-outs in stylus events were immediately followed by the 100%-CPU idling Christof and I reported earlier. This time I was able to sample it (attached). Unlike in rc3, in which I was not able to bring it back to normal once it got into that hot-idling mode, in 2.3.2.1, It resumes normal behavior after I transfer focus to it or do something in gimp (I have no other X11 clients running at the moment). In one instance, the act of sampling seemed to have flicked it back to normal -- which makes me wonder whether it is even possible to sample this condition accurately. Regards, --Gene