gnome-terminal tends to lock up

Using 6.10 beta with latest updates, and scim input flatform under en_US.UTF-8 locale. I tried toggling scim on and off and switching input methods.

i've seen this too, usually when there are a lot of tabs open, and there is a lot of data in the scroll-back buffer.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open a gnome-terminal window
2. Open 5 tabs in the gnome-terminal
3. Type "dmesg" or "cat /var/log/messages" in each tab for several times
4. Close a tab or two

I managed to reproduce it twice in less than 2 minutes. When locking up occurs, new gnome-terminal instances won't work unless all gnome-terminal instances are closed.

This is very annoying, and causes work loss.

It seems that lockup no longer occur If scim is disabled. So if you are not using scim, you need to type "im-switch -s scim-pinyin" in order to reproduce the problem.

Having seen gaim locking up as well, I guess it's more likely a scim bug.

Easier steps to reproduce:

1. Make sure you are using scim. If you are not already, type "im-switch -s scim-pinyin" in a gnome terminal. Log out Gnome and then log back in.

2. Open a gnome-terminal.

3. Press Ctrl-Shift-T for 5 times in very short intervals, to have 6 tabs open in all.

4. If the gnome-terminal is still "alive" at this time. Type "exit" to close tabs one by one. You'll probably get a dead gnome-terminal when closing the second or third tab.

i'm not using scim, or any non-english languages, so i can't comment on that-

i was not able to reproduce the lockups with the last use case.

I have witnessed the freezes before, it's usually when the terminal is maximized, and after it's been open for a while. It generally manifests it's self when i go to select some text in the terminal.

Do any of you use the proprietary 'nvidia' drivers or have accessibility features enabled?

Daniel: nope, i'm using neither nvidia drivers or accessibility features. In fact, my main machine is a mac G4 so closed binary drivers are basically out of the question.

I am not using anything special either. It's just a default Ubuntu 6.10 beta install with Chinese language support.

Could you get a backtrace when it hangs? Open an another terminal emulator and run "gdb -p $(pidof gnome-terminal)" then "thread apply all bt". You might want to install the dbgsym packages (apt source: "deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~pitti/ddebs edgy main") for gnome-terminal libvte9 and scim

(gdb) thread apply all bt

Thread 2 (Thread -1263727712 (LWP 6781)):
#0 0xffffe410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0xb77c93fb in __read_nocancel () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0
#2 0xb76bd45d in g_main_context_wakeup () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#3 0xb76da38f in g_thread_create_full () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#4 0xb77c3504 in start_thread () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0
#5 0xb762a51e in clone () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6

Thread 1 (Thread -1226299728 (LWP 6777)):
#0 0xffffe410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0xb7620803 in poll () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#2 0xb76bf813 in g_main_context_check () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#3 0xb76bfb89 in g_main_loop_run () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#4 0xb7b6f574 in gtk_main () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#5 0x0805fbe4 in main (argc=7, argv=0xbfd6b0f4) at terminal.c:1773
#6 0xb75728cc in __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#7 0x08054c51 in _start ()
#0 0xffffe410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()

Please note that input freezes also frequently occur in gaim and firefox. I filed bug #66104 <https://launchpad.net/bugs/66104> in scim the other day.

When input freezes occur in gnome-terminal using the above steps to reproduce, I can get a live gnome-terminal backup again if I close a few tabs by clicking the close button on the upper right corner.

As the discussion and tests in bug #66104 shows, what Wenzhuo experienced is a probably a well known (at least among input method people) bug. This bug usually shows up when user uses XIM (therefore using other GTK or Qt IM module seems to make this bug disappear), and is not restricted in GNOME. The discussions on SCIM mailing list and Redhat bugzilla suggest it is a bug in Xorg.

I've given a workaround in bug #66104, but only apply to SCIM users. This problem is more visible in Ubuntu than in Debian because Ubuntu's scim package set the /FrontEnd/X11/Dynamic configuration to false by default to get better support for deadkeys. Both upstream tarball and Debian package set this to true by default, and this bug won't show up in the default configuration.

thank you for the comments, I'm marking it as duplicated of bug #66104

Hmm, but robT said earlier in this report that he/she is not using scim, or any non-English lauguage (therefore not likely to be using XIM), so I doubt my analysis in bug #66104 applies to him/her.

robT is not the submitter of this bug and is apparently having a different issue. Wenzhuo issue seems to be the scim one that's why I marked it as duplicate

robT, could you open a different bug?

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 09:44:49AM -0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
>
> robT is not the submitter of this bug and is apparently having a
> different issue. Wenzhuo issue seems to be the scim one that's why I
> marked it as duplicate

Sounds good. I'll copy my comments and Redhat bug link to 66104 then.

Ming
2006.10.18

Sebastien & Ming: thanks for your help :)

the problem with the terminal that i've seen is so intermittent that it's been difficult for me to reliably reproduce it.

I'll open a new bug for this when i can figure out how to reproduce it, or if i can track down some more solid information about the issue.

@RobT I've been seeing this behaviour too recently with big (maximized) buffers with a lot of scrolling and switching terminals/windows.

Nvidia proprietary drivers, no SCIM (just US International keyboard with English).

Have you ever found a cause for your intermittent freezes?