Re: control-center 2.13.90 released

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 12:39 -0500, Pat Suwalski wrote:
> James Livingston wrote:
> > One thing I noticed is that the time is greatly affected by whether
> > Nautilus is drawing the desktop or not. I normally don't, but when
> > turned on the time was up to around a second. Drawing the icons and text
> > might take extra time, but is there something Nautilus is doing that
> > causes it to go that much slower?
> 
> BINGO. This narrows in on the culprit. Disabling "show_desktop" makes 
> the whole desktop 3-4 times more snappy, especially with EXA. It appears 
> that (at least with radeon), nautilus' desktop drawing breaks very 
> drastically.
> 
> But even with top-of-the-line nVidia (with closed driver), desktop 
> scaling speed is very much improved without nautilus.

This is actually not surprising at all. The desktop background is 
computed twice - once by (IIRC) gnome-settings-daemon and once
by nautilus.

gnome-settings-daemon modifies the actual root window, and also
a pixmap pointed to from a root window property, so:

 - If nautilus isn't running or is killed, or whatever, you
   still have a background.
 - Transparent terminals and other hacks that need to access
   the root window image can get the pixmap.

But nautilus is covering up g-s-d's work, so it has to compute
and draw the desktop as well.

So if things roughly double in speed when you disable nautilus,
this is about what is expected.

Regards,
						Owen