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I just installed Ubuntu 18.04 and am having a problem where I experience a 1 to 2 second delay when performing most commands in the gnome-terminal.

For example, if I open a new terminal and type ls<Tab><Tab>, then the system hangs for about 2 seconds before showing the auto-complete results. This behavior occurs with pretty much any command I try.

If I drop out of the desktop using <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<F3> then everything runs very fast without any delay. This leads me to believe that the issue has something to do with the graphics. I'm using an NVIDIA GTX 2060 Super with the non-free nvidia drivers. I first tried using the repository drivers nvidia-drivers-435 and when that didn't work I purged and installed the 440.64 drivers manually. Both of these seem to have been successful installations but I'm still getting this annoying hanging issue.

I've also tested my hard-disk read speeds using hdparm -tT /dev/sdc which indicates that the SSD drive the OS is installed on is working as expected. Before I had this issue I was running Ubuntu 19.10 (but had to revert for software compatibility reasons). I didn't have this issue in 19.10.

Is there some way to debug this so I could see what's actually causing the terminal to hang?

jodag
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  • How long is your $PATH? That is, how many directories does ls<TAB><TAB> need to search? – waltinator Mar 29 '20 at 23:37
  • @waltinator This is a fresh install so PATH is /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin. There are a total of 1967 files in the directories referred to by PATH. – jodag Mar 29 '20 at 23:38
  • I'm 99.9% sure it's related to ringing the system bell. Try disabling it in gnome-terminal's preferences, or configure bash (readline) not to ring the bell (.inputrc: set bell-style none). – egmont Mar 30 '20 at 09:58
  • @egmont Thank you for the suggestion. I just tried this but unfortunately the delay is still occurring. – jodag Mar 30 '20 at 17:23

1 Answers1

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So this is a little extreme but I was able to circumvent the issue by switching to Unity from GNOME3 (which isn't really a problem for me since I actually like Unity). I would still love to understand the underlying problem if anyone has a better answer or a way to debug.

To install Unity I followed the instructions for the accepted answer to this question

jodag
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