slapt-get does something strange when installing...

[GJones]

I'm not sure I'd call it I/O hogging, because it doesn't appear to be using any hard drive I/O. Or CPU hogging, because CPU use does not spike. But, when installing packages, and especially when cleaning up after installing them, slapt-get does something that invariably makes GUIs unresponsive for a few seconds. GTK applications freeze up, terminal windows stop accepting text input, the Xfce taskbar doesn't accept mouseclicks. A few seconds later everything is back to normal, but it's still a bit annoying.

The really funny thing is, X11 and the window manager are completely unaffected. The mouse cursor does not lag, and windows can be moved or alt-tabbed between without a problem.

Does anyone know why this happens? I've never seen it with any other package manager - not even slackpkg, nor Arch's pacman, which also uses the xz compression algorithm...

[thenktor]

What CPU, RAM, disk do you have?

[GJones]

Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1 GB DDR2, 160 GB Hitachi SATA hard disk. The computer is an Eee 1005HAB netbook.

[gapan]

Weird. Try running

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/hicolor

as root. Does it have the same effect?

[GJones]

Nope, doesn't have that effect.

[gapan]

There is nothing else that might have anything to do with GTK or Xorg in slapt-get. Even that is not slapt-get itself, but spkg and only for some packages. This shouldn't happen, as far as I know you're the only one experiencing something like this. Have you made any customizations to your system, like compiling your own kernel, playing with nice levels, changing cpu governors or anything?

[GJones]

Hmm. I am using the default (ondemand) CPU governor. Maybe CPU frequency throttling is responsible.

(In which case I'll just ignore this, since battery life goes to pot without CPU throttling.)

As for other stuff - I have set FS readahead fairly high, and use noop instead of the default cfq scheduler, but I was getting this problem before I made those modifications.

Oh, one other weird thing: it only happens with GTK applications, not Qt.

[Zappus]

I have quite similar issue. When i install app, and the time after, the mouse cursor becomes very slow, applications freeze up. text input becomes extremely slow. It gets better after some time but still reappears. The only way to fully fix the problem i found was to completely restart X server.

[thenktor]

Do you experience the same when installing packages with spkg -i and installpkg?

[GJones]

Slapt-src uses those right? In that case, no.