My ongoing battle against the mysterious mouse stutter seems to be abating. I made some headway last night when I installed fam on my Arch build (it’s a requirement for PCManFM), and suddenly I had mongo mouse lag. It was like a switch had been turned on … or was being intermittently turned on and off, if you can imagine that.

I had started fam as a daemon in the rc.conf file, and when I went back in to remove it, I changed by mind and backgrounded it. The effect was magical. After rebooting, I had no mouse lag whatsoever, and could still use PCManFM (my initial worry was that I would have to pull that).

Just as a test, I was online for over four hours today, surfing and blogging, running my memory usage way up past 256Mb (out of 512Mb) and dumping as much of a workload as I could on this little computer. It never staggered once. Not even on heavy Java or Flash pages.

So I don’t know that this sheds any light on my problem, but it is an interesting development. I’ve thus far installed inetutils-syslogd, added noapic and acpi=noirq to my boot line, pulled everything under the sun out of my Ubuntu build — but nothing had an immediate effect like pushing fam into the background.

I think I’ll try another Ubuntu installation soon, and see if there’s any way to duplicate those results.