Re: _NET_WM_USER_TIME reconsidered

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Elijah Newren wrote:
> I don't think having the WM being woken up on every keypress is all
> that big of a problem.  What I'm worried about is having lots of other
> apps woken up on every keypress.  We have a library called libwnck
> that is seeing strongly increased usage (both directly and through
> e.g. python language bindings).  libwnck can be used to build
> full-blown pager-like applications, but is also useful for many other
> cases.  Since libwnck watches toplevel windows to get its job done
> (e.g. needs to know hidden state changes, icon changes, name changes,
> etc.) every process using this library will be woken up on every
> keypress.  The number of context switches is simply going to increase
> over time as more and more apps use this library or others like it.

If people are just setting a property or something else small, using 
libwnck is kind of insane because it will do the whole "mirror and 
monitor complete state of all toplevel windows" song and dance whether 
you use all that state or not. The original intent was to have just one 
instance of libwnck really, shared by all the pager-like apps in the 
panel process.

i.e. for libwnck, context switches are likely only a small part of the 
problem ;-) this is NOT a library intended to be used by general purpose 
apps, because what it does (monitor every app on the system) is a crazy 
thing for most apps to do.

Havoc