On Thursday 16 Sep 2010 14:43:19 Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Thursday September 16 2010, Bob Williams wrote:
On Thursday 16 Sep 2010 04:57:15 Rajko M. wrote:
...
Would this also explain why my mouse pointer gets stuck every 30 secs or so? My keyboard buffer is also sluggish, and intermittently loses characters. IOW I'm typing away (I'm not a fast typer, so I'm not filling up the buffer quickly) when the screen stops displaying the characters I've typed. After a few seconds, it catches up, but may have forgotten some of the characters, so I have to keep going back and correcting my work. This can be especially frustrating when it happens while I'm entering a masked password on a website, for example.
Does everything with a connection to the screen pause? In my experience, things that you can tell are running but don't interact with the screen continue (audio plays, e.g.) but everything else pauses. Even mouse tracking freezes during these pauses.
I run GKrellM and a CPU spike that is bout 70% kernel mode is recorded for the duration of these pauses, though it appears there only after the pause is over, since as I said, all graphics updating pauses.
I have this symptom usually only when 3D apps are running, but it can occur at other times. Some digging on the Web turned up a kernel command line (boot-time) parameter that virtually eliminated the symptom outside of 3D apps:
vmalloc=192M
However, it's still too common when running 3D apps, and I find it _extremely_ annoying and disruptive and would dearly love to figure out what's going on and how to fix it. It is definitely not periodic and the pauses are of varying durations, from less than a second to a few seconds.
I'm currently running gkrellm, Amarok, Firefox, Kontact, Krusader, two instances of OpenOffice and mc in a terminal. Yakuake is running, but hidden, and I've got KeepassX, Basketnotes and skype in the system tray. I don't think any of those are 3D apps?
This symptom appeared for me as soon as I replaced the open-source nVidia driver with the proprietary one and was unaffected by the KDE 4.5.1 upgrade.
Your description seems to fit. I also run gkrellm, and notice the spikes. I shall try the boot parameter you suggest above.
My system details are in my sig, below.
Bob ... openSUSE 11.3, Kernel 2.6.34.12-desktop, KDE 4.5.1 Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz, 8GB DDR RAM, nVidia GeForce 9600GT
My configuration is similar. Dual core, not quad, 4 GB not 8, nVidia 8600GT, not 9600GT.
You don't say whether you're running 32-bit or 64. I'm running 32-bit.
64-bit
Randall Schulz
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