Keyboard Lag

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
> I get keyboard lag.  What do I mean, well as I type for a while what I
> type appears on screen immediately as it should but from time to time
> the cursor stops and then what I've been typing suddenly all appears
> at once and then things go back to normal.  This happens not just in
> Firefox but also in Open Office and even Kate.  Its like there is
> something hanging the system every few seconds but I've checked CPU
> usage and I can't find anything that's causing it.Sound: Sound Blaster Live
> 
> Any ideas?  This problem is getting really pronounced lately.

I am not sure what I am about to describe is your problem, but at least
it's a potential lead.
My problem was that when I was typing a long e-mail, regularly the
cursor would stop typing my text, it would hang for a few seconds, then
the text I typed during this interval would appear all of a sudden.
I found that the problem was two fold:

1) My internet serivce provider sometimes (once a year maybe) gives me
troubles: connecting to sites is very slow. Once connected, it's fast,
but the act of connecting is very slow.

2) My e-mail client is set to poll my POP mail server every 3 minutes.
So every 3 minutes it was trying to connect to the server, but since
the connection was crappy, it would hang/wait for the server, and while
doing so, it would stop reading what I was typing when composing an
e-mail. Since most e-mail are very short, it only showed when writing
long e-mails. The problem of course is that the e-mail client (was/is
"Sylpheed" in this case) should treat things in parallel, so that
polling a server doesn't hang the composing window.

Sylphee still has this problem, but since my ISP exhibits slow
connection times only very rarely, it's not really a problem in
practice... though it would still be nice to see Sylpheed get fixed.

You problem happens in other applications, that's why I am not sure how
relevant my experience is to you. However, Firefox is obviously related
to networking, and text editors/Kate, may also be connected to the
network, so may be affected by network problems like Sylpheed is.


HTH

--
Vince