About performance issue when moving windows around with metacity.

[Martin Holt Juliussen <mjuliuss online no>]

Hello

After using all of the GNOME -versions from 2.10 to 2.13 (including a
lot of dev-versions) I have been annoyed with the fact that when I move
windows around, it uses a lot of the CPU time. The consequence of this
is of course that the icons of the backgrounds disappears while I am
dragging and a lot garbage is left in other windows. I have a
understanding for this, since the programs which are active (I suppose
it is the windows manager in this case) is prioritized over those who
are idle. But shouldn't it be possible to do something about this?

A while back here on the performance-list there was a little thread
about capping the refresh rate in gnome-terminal [1]. I thought this
was, maybe not a optimal but, a good solution for the gnome-terminal's
performance issues.

And for a couple of days a go, while I was dragging windows around, it
struck me. Isn't it possible to do something like this with the metacity
performance issue? I.e. capping numbers of times the window and the
window's borders are updated while dragging it around. I have tried to
drag windows around with the alt-shift option in metacity really fast
where the window (only the window borders?) aren't updated more than the
times when it hits a obstacle. And while still using most of the CPU, it
seems more divided between updating the window I'm moving around and the
windows beneath.

This only my ideas, and if I was able to try to do something myself than
to create garbage on this list, I would. I hope it is at least a little
interesting idea but anyway, I'm no expert in X, Linux scheduling,
windows managers or GNOME.

[1]:http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/2005-November/msg00074.html

regards Martin Holt Juliussen