PageDown buffer not useful

[agb]

Version 1.9 Ubuntu 16.04

When I "less"-ing huge logfile with PageDown key it was buffered many times. After key release I need wait for a long time until it stops scrolling. I can't say the same about PageUp - it works fine.

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

I tried with a 168 M trace file and saw no issues. How big was the file? What type of log file? Does it contain very long lines? Were you using the "-S" flag of less to turn off wrapping? Do other terminal programs show the same behaviour or not?

Honestly I don't think this is directly related to Terminator. All we do is wrap the terminal widget libvte. If there is a slowdown somewhere it's likely to be somewhere in there, or in less itself.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

What I can imagine is that for whatever reason, it takes more time for "less" to scroll by a page than the keyboard repeat interval. Then if you press and hold PageDown, more and more occurrences of it will cumulate in the keyboard buffer, without "less" being able to catch up and empty them.

VTE is very fast in handling less's output and rendering a pageful of data, so I can't imagine this being the bottleneck. Probably the disk is slow ("less" is waiting for reading the contents), or "less" is problematic in some other way, or all of this happens over a slow network connection. If so, there's nothing VTE or Terminator could or should do about it.

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

An idea is to do a differential too. Test multiple terminal programs in near identical circumstances. In this instance I'd suggest testing with other libvte based terminals, konsole, and xterm.

If all terminals experienced the same issue, it's either less, or something intrinsic in how you're using it, such as Egmont says, a slow connection.

If all libvte terminals experienced the same issue, but none of the others did, then I'd be looking at vte.

If only Terminator experience the issue, then it's probably us, although in this case it's doubtful.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for terminator (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]