Re: Is it just me, or is E (and gnome) SLOW!

["Jesse D . Sightler" <jsight mindspring com>]

On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:40 Ronald de Man wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 1999 at 12:12:02PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Sat, 10 Apr 1999, Devin Butterfield wrote:
> > > 
> > > Has anyone noticed this problem?
> > > 
> > > Does anyone have any suggestions for how to deal with this...how to
> > > speed things up a little??
> > > 
> > 
> > Doesn't seem slow here on a P233. There are two special cases of slowness
> > recently noted: 1) if apps hang on startup they are fooling with esound 
> > 2) if you have an 8-bit display Imlib can take a long time to dither
> > pixmaps. Both of these are being fixed.
> 
> Maybe it depends on the definition of slowness. But in my experience
> moving around windows in E is very sluggish. That's on a P233 as well.
> On equivalent computers running Windows 95, moving around windows is
> much smoother. For a while I thought it must be X. But a few weeks ago
> I was helping out a friend on a P75 running fvwm2 (stock RH 4.2)
> and it was incredibly smooth.

It is definately your X server.  Apparantly the X server that you are using
doesn't support all of the acceleration features for your card.  This is a 
frequent problem with XFree86, although it is drastically better than it used
to be (and continueing to improve quickly).

But basically, if the X server isn't really taking advantage of the hardware
accelaration, it doesn't matter how fast the computer is, it WILL be slow.

E does seem slower than some other Window Managers, though, even at things
like window dragging.  But I can't complain, because multitasking is still
smoother than Win98 and drastically more stable.  And E is just so much nicer
to look at.  :)

---------------
Jesse D. Sightler
http://www3.pair.com/jsight/

"An honest answer can get you into a lot of trouble." 
         - Anonymous