HACKER Q&A
📣 themodelplumber

What are the little freezes while typing normally on a laptop?


This is an issue I'm having on a Latitude 7490 i7-8650U, 64GB RAM, SSD, currently running Manjaro...

While typing into Chrome every once in a while (ctrl-l, type search term) the input freezes for a couple seconds, like in the middle of typing the word Germany, it's like G-e-r (freeze) m-a-n-y

This seems off for "system capability" reasons, because A) none of my other laptops do this, even the old Lenovo T420 doesn't do this and B) I guess all it's doing is looking through my Chrome history.

The pauses also happen at other times when using different typing tasks in other apps. But I haven't found a good way to replicate this so far.

I made a 70GB swap file on the off chance that it had something to do with it, but the pauses still happen.

What might be some good places to start in troubleshooting? Is there some system caching mechanism or something else I should look into?

I'd be interested if this leads to more understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, so thought I'd ask here. Thanks.

  👤 ofalkaed Accepted Answer ✓
How is your touchpad setup? Depending on its settings it could be getting confused when you palm brushes it during typing, it pauses keyboard entry while it waits for your to to see what you are doing with the cursor. Probably set with synclient but I have not used Manjaro since it was brand new so I don't know. Lockeddrag/timeout, palmdetect, singletaptimeout and probably a few other settings could cause this, simple test is just to disable the touchpad and see if it keeps happening. If you only notice it while typing this is a good bet.

Edit: No, singletaptimeout could not cause this, was not thinking straight.

👤 PaulHoule
I don’t know if it your problem but those Dell power bricks sometimes fail to communicate how much power they supply which can cause a machine to feather the CPU and act sluggish. I’ve had many bricks (at least 4) go bad and I think some of the counterfeit Dell bricks last longer than real Dell bricks.

Check your CPU frequency.