Re: Minimum specs, "funky" defaults, and old machinery

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On 11 Mar 2001, jacob berkman wrote:

> On 11 Mar 2001 12:04:01 +0000, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> > My rambles about deskguide and tasklist in the panel reminded me of
> > something else which I thought should be separate from that reply.
> > 
> > What minimum specs are people here assuming Gnome will run on? 
> > I would love to know what people develop and test on. 
> > 
> > I have whinged about thumbnails being on by default before, particularly
> > on IRC. But people don't seem to care. "It makes no difference on my
> > computer". 
> 
> it makes a pretty noticable difference on my machine (in addition to it
> being unstable in the past (i think it is better now though)).  also, it
> sucks for laptops running on battery, since it keeps the cpu from
> sleeping much.  the crusoe's would help here :)
> 
> so, i would advocate with it being off by default.
> 
> tim, what are your views on this?

i have received mostly positive feedback on automatic thumbnailing and
figured that most people actually want it on (btw, it's on by default
for E as well), and regardless of the CPU type being used, it's not
usually a big consumer (that is, by default, thumbnailing code is only
run every 500ms, and even then, only a fraction of one window at a time
is grabbed). so i'm not too fond of the idea of generally turning it off
by default (also because it's a nice wow gimmick for gnome).

however, i see telsa's and your point that thumbnailing
a) isn't always wanted on _slow_ machines (i'm running it fine on an 
   old pentium without noticable slowdowns though)
b) badly affects battery usage on notebooks (i'm also turning it off
   on my laptop when battery-powered)

to give a couple of figures wrg CPU usage:
233MHz pentium, top CPU usage:  8-9%, load average: <0.15
550MHz pentium, top CPU usage:  1-2%, load average:  0.01
700MHz pentium, top CPU usage: <1.0%, load average:  0.01
900MHz athlon,  top CPU usage: <0.5%, load average:  0.00

so ideally, i'd like to
1) make the thumbnailing default depend on the available CPU
   performance, since anywhere beyond 500MHz the consumption
   is negligible (and there are alot of those machines out
   there these days that i wouldn't want to screw the default
   for).
2) feature switching thumbnailing on/off during runtime, depending
   on whether the system runs on battery power.

however, that has obvious portability issues.
one can do a bit of magic at least on linux via /proc/cpuinfo (though
"cpu MHz" tends to be pretty screwy for laptops) and /proc/apm, but
for all other systems we probably need to pick a static default ;(

comments?

> 
> jacob

---
ciaoTJ