Problem Launching Applications in Gnome

[Chuck Swiger]

On Mar 7, 2007, at 6:57 PM, ruggeri at uchicago.edu wrote:
> The main application I run is Vim, which I run through Gnome-
> Terminal.  I frequently have several copies running
> simultaneously.  In general response to Gnome-Terminal
> commands is very fast, but sometimes when I try to open a
> file with Vim it takes up to 20-30 seconds to load.  The
> files are not particularly large (max 300 lines).
>
> During this time, if I try to launch another application in
> Gnome (e.g., Opera or another Gnome-Terminal), it will not
> come up.  It is as if everything is frozen until finally Vi
> loads and opens the file, at which point anything else I have
> tried to open works fine.

Is it possible that you're low on RAM, and the system has to swap in  
a bunch of stuff to let you task-switch to Opera or GT?  Is it only  
the combination of GT & Vim, or do you sometimes encounter this long  
delay when switching between applications doing other things?

> I have of course looked at top when this problem occurs.  CPU
> usage is about 2%, and there is no significant memory usage
> either.

It would be helpful to know what state the GT & vim processes were  
in, too.

-- 
-Chuck