Re: REALITY CHECK: Resource usage of gnome

[Stephanos Piperoglou <sp249 cam ac uk>]

On Sun, 24 May 1998, Chris Frost wrote:

> I have experienced these same things...resizing gmc is awful! And, for
> some reason, if I start gmc moving windows (opaque) slows way down. I
> haven't played around w/ gnome enough yet to see if it's slow at anything
> else, but this is very noticeable. I know it's one of those things to be
> fixed Very Soon Now (tm).

As I was answered on this list previously, the main problem is that all
desktop icons are shaped pixmaps, and the Open Group's way for handling
these is kludgy at best. So unless you have an X server that does something
smarter with them, you have a problem.

Now I'm having a few doubts about this. I have fvwm2 compiled with shaped
pixmaps and most of my icons for it are shaped, and I've never had any
problems. But then again since fvwm2 is in charge of those *and* window
operations it probably handles the whole thing rather smartly.

I haven't done any coding for X (yet, GNOME is my first target, but it'll
have to wait until after my exams), but I still wonder why gmc is getting
requests to redraw its icons even when there's no movement over them. I'm
not sure this is an X issue. I'm in the dark here, but is gmc redrawing
icons based on redraws of the root window instead of redraws for the icons
themselves? Maybe we should look at fvwm2's handling of icon redraws and see
if we can snitch some code from there. It seems to handle shaped windows
flawlessly.

And it's not a matter of resources. I have a PMMX/200 with 32 megs of RAM
(and about 100M of swap) and an accelerated server for my Viper V330. That
should be blazing fast, and it is for anything other than gmc. I still think
this is gmc's problem. Maybe the event monitoring loop for drag & drop
events is badly optimized? Can the coders offer an insight?

-- Stephanos Piperoglou -- sp249@cam.ac.uk -------------------
All tribal myths are true, for a given value of `true'.
                         - Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
------------------------- http://www.thor.cam.ac.uk/~sp249/ --