Re: Deskguide performance ...

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Michael Meeks wrote:

> 
> Hi Tim,
> 
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Tim Janik wrote:
> > i have received mostly positive feedback on automatic thumbnailing and
> > figured that most people actually want it on
>  
>         If by 'automatic thumbnailing' you mean the toggle box
>  
>         "Fill window thumbnails with screen contents"
>  
>         Then please treat my feedback as the 2% of people that feel 5000%
> stronger about this issue than the other 98% who just don't care and thus
> balance them out.
>  
>         This option is the bane of my life, I have an extremely fast
> machine (650MHz), with lots of RAM and I need lots of lines in my emacs
> buffer. I have 4x4 virtual desktops, and no panel, just a foo-bar.
> 
>         So, I get things like this:
>                                                   % cpu %mem
>   811 root      19   0 23804  23M  2496 S       0 18.2  9.2 144:36 X
> 28069 michael   17   0  3812 3812  3044 S       0 14.4  1.4   0:04
> deskguide_apple
> 
>         Whilst not doing anything X intensive. ie. they are chewing up 40%
> of my CPU.

ok, from what you said below, i suspect that is due to shooting a 5th of your
window sizes every 500ms which aproximates 614kb. for reference, i'm running
resolutions close to 1600x1200 on the boxes i provided figures for, however
my desktop thumbnail is 22 pixels high which significantly reduces the required
throughput per shot.

>         Perhaps this would be no problem, but it appears the applet
> refuses to remember that I've told it not to kill my CPU/battery,
> neccessitating remembering to turn this option off whenever I re-start X /
> GNOME ( eg. before a GNOME presentation when I must change resolution ),
> consequently sometimes my demos run at half speed, and frequently my
> batteries die in their youth.

well, deskguide does the usuall session specific save/restore stuff that
all other applets use as well. if that fails for you, it's probably not only
deskguide forgetting its settings. for what its worth, i'm seeing this problem
daily as well with dozens of application, our session management is just fuubar,
i just don't have the time to hack that as well.

>         So, I don't know what the root of the problem is; I have X 3.3.6,
> and Deskguide 0.4, from gnome-core-1.3.0.
>  
>         I suspect it could be due to the final size of each pane in the
> deskguide being so small, and the problems of interpolating down a
> 1500x1024x16bits desktop to 8x5 pixels. It is almost totaly pointless
> doing this with such a small view.

thanks for point this out, it led to my above figures.

>  
>         Regards,
>  
>                 Michael.
> 

---
ciaoTJ