[Pkg-urxvt-maintainers] Bug#715537: rxvt-unicode: slow rendering in 32-bit mode

[Grzegorz Niewisiewicz]

Package: rxvt-unicode
Version: 9.18-2
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I use urxvt and the i3 window manager. When urxvt runs in 32-bit color
depth the rendering becomes very slow in some circumstanses. The lag is
about one second. It's very noticable and annoying.

There are four forms of the lag:

1. when opening a new terminal on a workspace that already contains a
terminal the screen is divided in half and I can see the rendering of
the new terminal line after line from top to bottom

2. when opening a new terminal on an empty workspace the title bar is
rendered but the content rendering lags

3. when switching to a workspace that already contains a terminal the
title bar is rendered but the content rendering lags

4. when closing one of multiple terminals on a workspace the
re-rendering of the remaining terminals lags

What's interesting is that I wasn't able to reproduce the bug under
xmonad (but I didn't try hard).

I started tweaking my Xresources and it seems that chaning the color
depth (Rxvt.depth) to anything other than 32 solves the problem (right
now I'm using 24). I'm not able to reproduce the situation anymore. When
I switch back to 32 and merge with xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources the problem
reappears instantly.

The urxvt manpage mentions potential problems when using 32-bit color
depth however it does so in the context of buggy Xft and no RENDER
extension. The extension is enabled in my case.

Regards

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.1
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (700, 'stable'), (600, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=pl_PL.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages rxvt-unicode depends on:
ii  base-passwd               3.5.26
ii  libc6                     2.17-7
ii  libfontconfig1            2.9.0-7.1
ii  libgcc1                   1:4.7.2-5
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0        2.26.1-1
ii  libglib2.0-0              2.33.12+really2.32.4-5
ii  libperl5.14               5.14.2-21
ii  libstartup-notification0  0.12-1
ii  libx11-6                  2:1.5.0-1+deb7u1
ii  libxft2                   2.3.1-1
ii  libxrender1               1:0.9.7-1+deb7u1
ii  ncurses-base              5.9-10

Versions of packages rxvt-unicode recommends:
ii  fonts-vlgothic [fonts-japanese-gothic]  20120629-2
ii  ttf-dejavu                              2.33-3

rxvt-unicode suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information