emacs-nox can only accept about three lines of pasted text data inside either a gnome-terminal or xterm. Xemacs works well, as does vi/vim. The version in question is emacs-nox-20.3-15
When the ordinary emacs (the one from emacs-X11) is run with the "-nw" argument (run in console), this doesn't happen
Fixed. The problem was different keyboard buffer sizes when configured without without X support.