Xterm freezes while running process

[mkrutz]

We run a number of applications in individual xterms (xterm -e <whatever>). Seemingly related to the level of debug information coming to stdout, the xterm will periodically "freeze" the running program (the more output coming to the xterm buffer, the faster the freeze will occur). A simple movement of the mouse back into the xterm unfreezes the application.

Has anyone see this before? Are there options I can put in the .XResources file that will prevent this hangup? Of course running these programs with nohup masks the issues but the nohup.out file grows dramatically.

[Rubberman]

My best guess is that the xterm freezes temporarily in order to deal with the memory issues caused by the application output overflowing the scroll-back buffer. It could be that because the xterm wasn't in focus that it was swapped to disc as well, resulting in the perceived behavior. So, check your memory and swap utilization. As for the use of nohup, you can redirect the output of the nohup'd application to /dev/null to keep nohup.out from growing, though at the cost of losing possibly important debug information.