[ltp] Less responsive input (blind typing) when running off battery

[John Magolske]

I find that while running off battery & not plugged into AC there are
frequent and regular "freezes" when typing. All of a sudden I'll find
myself "blind-typing" for 3 seconds or before a backlog of characters
bursts on the screen. I notice this in Vim...maybe other applications
too but can't confirm it at the moment.

I'm wondering if this might have something to do with the hard drive
being in some power saving mode where it spins down more frequently
while not plugged into AC power. Vim seems to write every single key
press to disk as I type, so maybe the disk needs to spin up before
something else can happen...just a guess. But I notice that even
moving the text cursor around with the arrow keys is subject to this
freezing behavior. Using the nice command like so:

  % nice -n -20 vim some-file-to-edit.txt

Has no effect. The /etc/fstab entry for my hard-drive is:

  /dev/disk/by-uuid/[...]  /  ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro  0 1

Any thoughts as to what might be causing this? I'm running Debian Sid
on an x200s, using Vim in a screen session in a frambuffer console.

Thanks for any help,

John

-- 
John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact