Description of Problem: catting a binary file or /dev/urandom causes gnome-terminal to consume large amounts of resources, enough to make the system difficult to use. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.0.0-3 How Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. cat /dev/urandom or a binary file 2. 3. Actual Results: Severe system degradation Expected Results: Snappy display of random trash Additional Information:
Not sure if this is a bug or a "don't do that then" ... There's already an open bug to improve VTE performance, probably this is a dup of that if anything. Of course improved VTE performance may well hose your system more by sucking off of /dev/urandom more quickly and making more system calls.
This should be fixed in 0.7.4 and later. (Basically what was happening was that the terminal detected bogus multibyte input, munged the first bogus byte into '?', read some more text from the child process, and then started again. When catting /dev/urandom, this would build up more pending data with each iteration, leading to horrible slowdowns.)
I'm still seeing gnome-terminal eating CPU for breakfast when I do 'cat /dev/urandom' with vte-0.8.10-1 . . . am I missing something here?
Jay, when you break out of catting /dev/urandom, the terminal should recover almost instantly. Previously it would still be attempting to work through a considerable backlog of garbage data, and would remain unresponsive, even if you told gnome-terminal (via its menu) to reset.
OK, I misunderstood the problem. Indeed, as soon as you hit CTRL-C the process exist and the system recovers, so this is resolved.