Fast on root

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi,

I've already seen that (including in xfce4 and Rox filer, on which I
posted the results of my "investigations" a while back)

Do you use an NVidia card with NVidia drivers? What I found, is that
when using an NVidia card along with NVidia binary drivers, most of the
video memory is kept for 3D textures as it seems, leaving very small
space for regular pixmaps (note that might show on other cards, with
other drivers, It just happen that I've seen this behaviour only on this
kind of cards).

As a result, XFree has to put some of its pixmaps in reular memory, and
transfer rate is very slow compared to actual video memory access. Thus,
the all environment looks and feels dramatically slow. It's not always
that visible, though, on my own GeForce4, I see slow downs when bringing
lower windows back to top, but regular operations are fast otherwise.

Amazingly enough, it shows on the lhe latest greatest hardware, using
the latest drivers. Try this: xkill xfdesktop and see it speed improves.
If it does, then you have the answer.

Then try using a smaller background image, that might help in that case.
xfwm4 heavily uses the graphic card for all its operations (that's maybe
why it usually feels faster than other window managers) and stores
pixmaps in caches that are kept by the X server.

You may also try to configure the X driver to allow a bit more memory
for pixmaps.

Let us know if what I suggest gives any improvement.

Cheers,
Olivier.

On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 12:18, Lionel Laratte wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I installed XFCE4 rc4 and, for some reason, it ran slowly as a regular
> user.  I switched to Fluxbox because of this.  Last night, to perform
> some maintenance, I logged in as root and XFce4 ran very fast and very
> well.  I would like to switch back to it as a user but it's still slow
> that way.  Any idea why?
> 
> Lionel
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Olivier Fourdan - fourdan at xfce.org
   
   Interoperability is the keyword, uniformity is a dead end. 
   http://www.xfce.org