Xfce pretty slow?

[Olivier Fourdan]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 2:25 PM, Michael Schmarck
<michael.schmarck at habmalnefrage.de> wrote:
> [...]
>  So I "guess" :) that COMPOSITE indeed is turned on. Will try to
>  dsable it (and will, before and afterwards, do "Check Settings >
>  Window Manager Tweaks").
>
>  So, just to summarize, because of the COMPOSITE extension,
>  changing desktops is slow. In general. Is that right?

No, you might be confused between the composite extension and the compositor.

Having the composite extension available does not necessarily mean
that you are using a compositor.

However, xfwm4 includes a compositor (whereas neither fluxbox nor
metacity do (*)) so if you have the compositor extension available,
xfwm4 will enable the compositor.

Compositing means that rendering of windows is done in pixmaps off
screen, and the display is then composed by the compositor. If you
hardware is not powerful enough this may seem slow. Since all window
contnt is done off screen, there is another level of indirection that
mey slow down all content updates (including of course FF)

The best way to disable compositing all together is to disable the
compositor extension in xorg.conf

Section "Extensions"
        Option  "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

HTH,
Cheers,
Olivier.