On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Marc Lehmann wrote: > On Fri, Dec 07, 2007 at 01:42:31PM +0000, Reuben Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: >>> You need to use an idle watcher. >> >> I don't understand. Won't that simply postpone the code? > > Yes. > >> I don't mind it running (just like other apps I have open) I just don't >> want it blocking the other terminals. > > You can't do that without an idle watcher - it runs when the app has nothing > better to do, which means it has to use a lower priority than the tasks that > update the other terminals.
I don't want the app to wait until it has nothing better to do, I just don't want the reformatting to stop me from using it! Am I being unclear? I would like reformatting to continue *while* I use urxvt. > Are you sure you are looking at it right? Free certainly is a different > value than cache on all opertaing systems. Cache means the memory isn't > free, but used for other purposes. It doesn't preclude the scrollback > being swapped out, for example. Modern Linux doesn't really ever give you "free" memory: memory not used by processes is used to cache the file system, swap &c. > Thats fine, but there is really no way it could take *minutes*. A few > seconds I could accept, but minutes is out of the question. There must be > other factors around, like urxvtd running under valgrind, or beign swapped > out etc :) Swapping is indeed the main suspect here, but I'm at a loss to see why. > Thats your problem, not enough memory. > >> Mem: 507792k total, 498888k used, 8904k free, 25852k buffers >> Swap: 522104k total, 261052k used, 261052k free, 67636k cached >> >> i.e. ~100Mb of RAM free. > > I see 25mb, not 100, which is rather little, given that linux (I assuem > you use linux) will not use all the buffer cache. I'm seeing "67636k cache", i.e. it's caching 67Mb of swap in RAM. That's basically free too. > If you compile without --enable-unicode3, then each character will need 6 > bytes instead if 8, which helps a lot with big scrollbacks. I'm just using the Debian package. > You probably use it a lot more, Not really. I'm normally swapping between email (in a urxvt), Emacs, and various terminals. Also, most of the Emacs buffers I don't visit in a given day. Part of the problem with urxvt is that it reformats all my history whenever a window is resized, i.e. it visits pretty much all its memory, whether or not I ever look at it. I have large scrollback buffers just in case, and sometimes I'm very glad I do, but I guess I'll try cutting down on that for a bit to see if it helps. I agree that more memory would solve my problem; sadly my laptop is not upgradeable any further, and since the problem is clearly soluble in theory, I thought it was worth discussing. Basically, the way that urxvt works at the moment doesn't play very well with virtual memory, it relies on having enough physical memory. That's a pity. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org/ | free, a. already paid for (Peyton Jones) _______________________________________________ rxvt-unicode mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schmorp.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rxvt-unicode
