Re: Application runs slowly, crashes when wiggling the mouse quickly

[Wallace Owen <wallace owen L-3Com com>]

It sounds like lightening the load merely reduces the chance of hitting
some race condition.  You say your app makes heavy use of the serial
port.  Are you doing this in a separate thread?  If so, is that thread
also making gtk calls (in addition to the main thread)?


  // Wally

On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 14:41 -0400, blythe2 tcnj edu wrote:
> I'm writing an application that makes fairly heavy use of the serial port.
>  While testing this app, things seem to be running fine, until I wiggle
> the mouse quickly over a treeview (a list) or over a few checkboxes in the
> window.  Sometimes I have to wiggle for a minute, sometimes just 5 seconds
> will do, but the app crashes, with either a segfault, or GLib reporting a
> corrupted doubly linked list.
>
> Some thoughts:
> 1.  Wiggling the mouse anywhere besides over the treeview or the
> checkboxes causes no problems.
>
> 2.  Processor usage goes up significantly when wiggling the mouse over the
> treeview or the checkboxes.
>
> 3.  The problem can be completely avoided by making the offending widgets
> non-sensitive (dimmed out).
>
> 4.  I'm running on an old computer, a Celeron, at around 400Mhz or so :(
>
> Could number 4 be the culprit?  Perhaps wiggling the mouse over some
> widgets (and thus causing GTK to redraw them, presumably) slows down the
> system so much (70% processor usage at the time of death sometimes) that
> some routines or signals interrupt themselves and do something naughty?
>
> When I modify the program (skipping key routines) to drastically lower the
> processor usage, the problem goes away.
>
> I would like to chalk this up to a weak computer... but it seems unlikely
> to me that GTK simply blows up on old computers (with very busy apps).
>
> For reference:
>   400 Mhz Celeron
>   128 Megs ram
>   Debian Linux
>   GTK 2.6
>
> Any advice is appreciated!
>
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