Why text editor is sluggish over time
 

Why does gedit get sluggish over time? I can expect this behavior from what other apps? Is there a cure? There's no reason from a hardware standpoint that anything should lag on most of the current machines today, including mine. 16GB ram - 20% used; 3.4 GHz processor - that's blazing by yesterday's standards. What's happening?

slow gedit?
 

Does the size of the file you are editing make a difference?

supposing you use gedit for coding: install a different text editor/IDE - e.g. geany.
imho, gedit is mostly gnome eyecandy.



how many?

one quad core - I've used emacs - that was pretty good, but I'm looking for something light weight that can keep up. I'll give geany a try.

Thanks ondoho

I agree with wpeckham.
More to the point, can you reproduce the problem reliably - what data/proof can you supply that might help us to help you.
What is the diskspace like ?

I can't help suggest IDEs, I always use vi/vim - a very lightweight editor, but you have to be able to manage with just that.

No. When I asked what is happening, my guess was that it was not doing memory management (caching) strategies properly. The other possibility was that there was some system switch or flag that I should have set. I'll use another program. Thanks wpeckham.

I've had IIS, MSSQL Server, and Visual Studio all running on this computer simultaneously, so the system is not the problem - its the editor.

I know Intel and AMD documentation are both tedious and hard to find, but they are critical if you want your software to perform flawlessly. I say that because the source of most software problems is not the hosting software system (usually the OS), but rather its the developer who doesn't know the hardware (processors) well enough to write for them. Got to know your semaphores.

You might say oh that just for system software development, but no its not. You've got to be able to trace your signals and make sure the right information is going to the right place. Then you know you've got a winner.

Over how much time?

Here's an idea for testing. Open a terminal and run top (or htop or the utility of your choice). When you start to notice decreased performance in Gedit, check that terminal window to see what's changed with Gedit's memory usage and what else might be going on.

You can also pipe the output of top to files so you can review the files later at your leisure.

I disagree that Gedit is "Gnome eye candy." It's a serviceable little GUI editor with a number of features and options for mark-up which are not readily apparent without snooping around the menus. I happen to prefer Kate (and I prefer vim to either of them, but it took me a long time to get comfortable using vim; when I did, it was because of this tutorial), but I for one would not dismiss Gedit so casually.

Ok. Not a normal behavior. Probably Nvidia. Woops, what did I say. geany is working flawlessly. I used Emacs when 'it opens two windows' was important to me. Probably even used vi and vim for awhile -but settled on Emacs. Anyhoo, troubleshooting these systems is getting way too painful. Never know how deep the rabbit hole goes, and along the way the path dark forks to a continuous loop of unending frustration and poor customer service support. Thanks for the top command toy - I'm on it.

you still have not answered
over WHAT time frame
and WHAT you are doing

is gedit open ALL DAY and are you just oping new files and closing them and NOT closing down gedit

or

are you editing the SAME file all day long and saving it
then editing it and resaving and so on ....
and never restarting gedit

or


are there 500 tabs open all with unsaved documents ?

glad you found geany ... i think.
well i know at least one contributor to this thread who'll use even more capitals after reading this.

a) there's no customer service, because you didn't buy anything, so you're not a customer in the first place, and we're not getting paid.
b) nobody can attempt to help you if you don't supply additional info requested. so who's poor?
top is not a toy, but a tool.

i think you should be taking all this a little more seriously, there's real people here on the other end, you know?

hmmmmm
 

Personally, I prefer vim and the terminal window, but when I "go gui" gvim is my first choice.

I have attempted to replicate the reported behavior, and am not seeing the performance issue described. (Although, since the additional data requested has NOT been forthcoming it could be that I am not reproducing the same conditions).

I begin to wonder if the OP really wants a solution.

ondoho: I moved on when I found a working solution. >I was talking about the vendors, help desks, and product support that I deal with on a daily basis. >Its a toy when it is fun or new and one is learning to use it. Someone called it the joy of work. The fresh smell of Lysol makes working a little more enjoyable. That (joy) translates down to stress relief when being calm is important (especially in a leadership role). If you don't get that stress relief you end up pissing yourself. Some people are good at presenting solutions, while others are in it for a sense of self-aggrandizement. I don't fault the latter, but their solutions are usually not helpful. Most times in a technical forum the question and solution are most important. I appreciate a usable solution. >Because I'm moving from Windows servers I need to learn bash and php - a few thousand pages of reading. I've installed XAMPP and netbeans (per Joel Murach) for dev env. Thank you for the response and helpful solutions.

I'm good. ondoho suggested geany, and that's a great solution for a simple and fast text editor, which is all I need. The problem was that I was using gedit normally - opening and closing one file at a time over short time periods, and it was choking. My thought was that it had a problem or memory leak working in this distro (Rafaela 17.2). Not having time to do any thorough testing I just canned gedit for geany. Problem solved. Problem may be in the dual boot system, but again I don't have time or the knowledge to track it down right now, and I'm hoping it doesn't affect anything else.

solutions are not always fixes..
 

Good for you! Glad you are happy with that solution.

In all my years I have only seen one real problem arise from a system being dual-boot: shortage of disk space. That was back when a BIG HONKIN DISK was about 2G, and this one was well short of that. Once the boot is done, the OS has full control as if it was the ONLY OS installed.

I will make no guesses about the cause of your issue, and it will never matter unless someone is able to replicate that condition.

Best of luck!