Re: Look at what the panel does now before discussing what it should do!!

[Eric Kidd <eric kidd pobox com>]

On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 04:20:59PM +0200, Richard Hult wrote:
> Have you tried enabling the setting "Keep menus in memory" somewhere in
> the global panel configuration?

I retested with that option selected, and it seems to speed things up quite
a bit (even after an hour of inactivity). I'll try again tomorrow morning
(after 8+ hours inactivity) and see if things slow down any.

Still, the default settings are painfully slow on my machine. Three seconds
to open the system menu is not good.

Where could the time be going? Possible guesses:

 1) Stat'ing files whose inodes have been flushed from the block
    cache. Since disk seeks are expensive, this could take up some time.
    But the current panel code is very clever about stat'ing, so I doubt
    the problem lies here.
 2) Rebuilding the Gtk+ menus (not counting time spent on the icons). If
    the menu objects get purged from memory, the panel must recreate them.
    But I sincerely doubt that Gtk+ requires three seconds to rebuild just
    the root menu.
 3) Recreating the icons in a purged menu. I'm willing to bet that this is
    the real culprit. If the icons are getting flushed, it's going to take
    a while to recreate them.

If (3) is the problem, what are some possible solutions? Would it be
possible to display the menu before the icons are ready, and insert the
icons as they arrive? This would provide immediate feedback to the user,
and wouldn't require people to change the default panel settings.

Cheers,
Eric

P.S. An offer for whoever makes the default panel settings very fast:
If you live near a pizza delivery place that takes American credit cards,
I'll buy you dinner. :-)