Scrolling Speed Bad

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2007-08-22 at 23:25 -0600, Karl Pearson wrote:
> On Tue, August 21, 2007 11:03 am, Rick Stevens wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 22:36 -0600, Karl Pearson wrote:
> >> Is there something I can do to speed up the scrolling of windows.
> >> Specifically, when I'm running a script in xterm, the scrolling is very
> >> slow.
> >> It's even slower in Firefox. If I use the mouse wheel to scroll, it's very
> >> annoying to the point that the mouse pointer is lost and I have no control
> >> until the scrolling stops. In xterm, it's just as bad, but I've not tested
> >> the
> >> mouse wheel scrolling. If I click on the border thing (hey, I've lost my
> >> mind
> >> and can't remember what it's called) it scrolls fast as a jump.
> >>
> >> Any ideas?
> >
> > This sounds like an X rendering issue.  Which X driver are you using?
> 
> This is a cheap laptop with a UniChrome Pro IGP chipset and the OpenChrome
> driver doesn't address it because it's too new and the OpenChrome project
> hasn't done anything for a while. I've assigned the vesa driver and it's
> what's slow. I'm not sure what other driver I could try.

Yeah, that's a weird chipset.  Unless there's some accelerated driver
for it, you're kinda stuck.  I suppose you could reduce the depth of
the viewport from 24 to 16 or something, but that reduces your color
rendering, and generally the vesa driver isn't truly horrible.  Perhaps
there's something else, such as the shared memory segment being slow
or you're swapping a lot.

Have you tried googling for the PCI ID of the chipset?  Perhaps there's
another driver out there that can work with it even if your X doesn't
recognize it due to its newness.  In that case you can force X to use
the new driver anyway.

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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
-                                                                    -
-     The trouble with troubleshooting is that trouble sometimes     -
-                             shoots back.                           -
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