Re: Slow applets

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 11:32:58AM -0400 or thereabouts, Jason Shanley wrote:

[other attributions lost, sorry]

>>>>  If you have a "slow" machine you should consider not running all 
>>>> those nice panel applets with those useless features (do you realy 
>>>> need to know the weather?, for example). 

>>> Agree with you here! 
>>> Who the hell writes those dumb applets? How the **** little applet 
>>> can eat whole 5 megs of RAM???? This jsut pisses me off. Abi World 
>>> eats something around 5 megs!! I gueess, those applet writers got 
>>> their hands growing from the wrong place. 

This is a misconception. When people look at the 'memory' being used,
they generally see all the shared libraries too. You have to take the
apparent total size, remove the shared stuff, and that will give you
the amount.

This is so commonly misunderstood that it is covered in a document
in gnome CVS, where anyone can grab it (or read it off the web if
they don't want to grab lots of CVS stuff), and there is a pointer
to it in the FAQ.

I did also attempt to explain the different kinds of memory and the
different displays in the documentation to gtop, but I fear I failed :)

>>> Same thing about Pixmap themes, only crazy people can work in such a 
>>> slowliness. On my P2-333 I can't afford myself using one of those 
>>> cool Pixmap themes. So I use some pretty cool "basic" themes, but 
>>> still, M$ is faster :( 

>  What would you consider a "pixmap theme" (im a little new at this)  
>  i would love to speed up my computer so should i stick with the 
>  default gnoem and sawfish themes, are there still pretty themes 
>  that arent so slow.  

Pixmap themes tend to be the ones with repeating patterns and intricate
textures instead of plain colours. They are very heavy on memory and
CPU in comparison with the engine themes because when you, say, move
a window, the computer has to fill in the background under that window.
If it's just a plain colour, it's easy. If it has to draw a complicated
pattern or texture or use loads of colours, it takes more effort.

Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to get a nice list which 
says "pixmap" or "engine" next to each theme name in the control-center.
This is a shame, because to find out which something is, it means you
have to poke around the machine and learn more than you probably wanted
just to find out. There is a list of engine themes in the FAQ in the
"speeding GNOME up" section: "Engine themes (non-pixmap) themes include
gtkstep (the default), metal, notif, redmond95, thinice, clean and 
xenophelia." Any more non-pixmap themes that come with GNOME by default:
please let me know and I'll add them :) 

   Linkname: Using GNOME day to day
        URL: http://www.gnome.org/faqs/users-faq/using.html

And follow the links to the questions,

   Q: I have a slow machine. How can I speed GNOME up?
   Q: I looked at the memory used by GNOME. It uses loads, and even
   killing things off doesn't free it up! Help!

The MemoryUsage document lives in CVS in gnome-docu/white-papers/MemoryUsage/
as either MemoryUsage.sgml for the DocBook source or MemoryUsage.txt for
a plain text file of it.

You can read it on the web through the CVS browser at
http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/white-papers/MemoryUsage/MemoryUsage.txt


Oh yes. The difference between GTK and window manager themes comes up
occasionally:

o window manager theme set the appearance of the edges of the window, 
the titlebar font, icons and colour, and sometimes the background image. 
o GTK themes set the fonts and colours in the GNOME menus and the colour 
of what I call 'grey space': the "File, edit, help" stuff in the menubars, 
the great grey space on the right when you start the control centre, 
and the toolbars: like "install, unselect, uninstall.." in GnoRPM or
"new, restart, select..." in the AisleRiot game.)

If you're pressed for speed, you want light themes for both of those.

Telsa