gnome-screensaver photo slideshow CPU usage

[ajkessel <adam rosi-kessel org>]

The photo slideshow screensaver in gnome-screensaver puts such a load on my
laptop's CPU that the fan runs constantly and tasks such as music playing
with totem become very choppy. Although it's an older laptop, I would hope
it wouldn't be viewed as totally obsolete: it's a Pentium III 700 MHz with
512M RAM.

The only way I can get music to play smoothly while the screensaver is on is
to renice -1 the music task and +20 the screensaver task.

Is there some reason the photo slideshow is so CPU intensive? At first I
thought it was because it was resizing the images to fit the screen, but
after converting all the images in my image directory to 1024x768 (the LCD
resolution), the result is identical. 

Can anyone suggest a workaround for this? It doesn't seem like too much to
ask for to be able to play normal bitrate MP3s and have the screensaver on
at the same time.
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