[GRASS5] network traffic

[Roger Miller]

Folks,

I run GRASS (5.0.0pre2) through ssh on a ppp connection to my installation at 
the office.  I used the command line interface.  When I start a monitor the 
lag between keystrokes and displayed results often increases.  Starting a 
second monitor virtually stops everything.  The lag between the time a key is 
pressed and the time it appears on the screen sometimes exceeds 30 seconds.

I started pppstat on my local machine to see what was going on, and found 
that the first monitor generated a continuous stream of network traffic at 
about 8kb/second incoming and 4-5 kb/s outgoing.  Somewhat bizzarly, starting 
a second monitor dropped that stream to about 5 kb/second incoming and about 
200 bytes/s outgoing.  The command shell slowed to a near halt.

After I stopped the second monitor the network traffic initially stayed at 
about 4 kb/s incoming and 200 bytes/s outgoing, but the traffic later rose 
fairly gradually back to about 8 kb/s incoming and 4-5 kb/s outgoing.

All of this behavior is with a blank monitor--nothing at all in the display.  
The behavior is the same regardless of whether the monitor is raised or not.

For comparison, "xeyes" running over the same link and taking a continuous 
stream of mouse events generated about 1/10 that much traffic.  "xcalc" 
running over the same link generated no traffic at all when it wasn't being 
used. 

I tried with a second installation at my office that was based on a CVS 
download from last August.  That appeared to have the same problem.  I have 
until recently been using a beta11 installation and never noticed the problem.

What's going on here?  Is this problem unique to my installations or is this 
a consistent behavior?


Roger Miller