Vinagre SSH session eats too much X resources

Binary package hint: vinagre

OS : Ubuntu Karmic (patches are up-to-date)

There is a huge performance related bug in Vinagre for SSH session terminals.

After such a session has been opened, general drawing speed is very slow in the embedded terminal : a simple thing such as a 'top' lags noticeably at each screen refresh. Worse, launching a command which outputs continuously on the standard output completely blocks the X server, which becomes unresponsive (ie. whole desktop is frozen) until vinagre is killed. It probably means that vinagre is flooding the X server with drawing commands ....

Connecting to the same remote servers and launching the same commands from a "standard" gnome terminal works perfectly, and since vinagre uses (I think) the same VTE widget, there must be something fishy going on in vinagre itself.

There is a very interesting workaround for this bug : if the vinagre window is unmaximised and then maximised again, the slow down completely disappears ! The console behaves perfectly like a standard gnome terminal after that.

In case it would be related to a graphic driver problem, it's an Intel Q35 chipset (using the free intel driver shipped with karmic).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Jan 28 10:02:31 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/vinagre
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release Candidate amd64 (20091020.3)
Package: vinagre 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-17.54-generic
SourcePackage: vinagre
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-17-generic x86_64