Re: Mainloop debugging tool idea

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:55:49 +0100
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
> I had some problems with gnome-shell's responsiveness on particularly
> dodgy hardware, and was wondering whether the shell was actually
> blocking at any point.

I cannot answer your question about diagnosing this, and I am not sure
if it counts as "dodgy hardware", but since gnome-3.6 my netbook with
1.6GHz Atom and 2GB of ram suffers from periods when the shell jams.
Usually this is for around 5 to 10 seconds but it can go on for longer.

The netbook does not perform well when there is contention for the hard
disk, so that might possibly be connected to it.  If the shell's main
loop is providing services for tracker, maybe that is making assumptions
about how quickly it can get to the disk.

I have not noticed this problem on more high powered hardware, nor was
it present with gnome-3.4.

Chris