MCS manager [WAS: screenshot plugin and xfmenu grab]

[Benedikt Meurer]

Olivier Fourdan wrote:
> Hi Benny,

Hey Olivier,

>>Please, not another useless MCS plugin. The MCS manager already takes a
>>lot of time to startup and requires way too much memory. Why not simply
>>store the two/three prefs using XfceRc (that's what the panel does)?
> 
> I don't know why you keep saying that the MCS manager requires too much 
> memory. It does its job and I'm not sure it uses more memory than other 
> components.

It simply takes too much memory, for example, here xfce-mcs-manager is
at 2896kB (unsharable data memory, Gtk+ 2.6), and that's too much for a
preferences provider. Contrast this with Thunar, which requires only
slightly more memory (2900kB) to display folder with 1261 files and 107
subdirectories (see the thunar wiki for details).

And concerning the startup time: The time it takes to fire up
xfce-mcs-manager in xfce4-session (xfce4-session is definitly too heavy
as well, but that's a post-4.4 issue) is noticable when starting from
cold cache (probably the UI plugin, haven't checked). I'll enable that
loadprof and check next time.

Sure, xfce-mcs-manager does its job and is quite usable for some
components such as the window manager and the UI stuff. But it's
definitly overhead for stupid things like screenshot preferences (esp.
since due to the limitations of XSETTINGS, only the daemon can alter
preferences, and so one cannot just remember the last settings easily).

Don't get me wrong, XSETTINGS will probably survive for some time, and
so will xfce-mcs-manager serve us for some time. But as soon as a simple
daemon, that should do nothing more than serving a few string/int/color
values most of the time, starts consuming as much memory as a file
manager displaying a large folder, one should sit down and think twice
before adding even more (useless) overhead there.

Even gconfd requires less memory (1684kB unsharable data memory), while
serving a lot more preferences than xfce-mcs-manager. Most of the memory
seems to be consumed because the config dialogs run as part of the mcs
manager process. This was probably a design mistake, though it probably
looked good at the time of pre-4.0. Anyway this is definitly
out-of-scope for 4.4.

The point is that people should not add any more MCS channels (and esp.
not config dialogs) w/o a very good reason. If we keep that in mind,
xfce-mcs-manager will continue to work fine (and nearly lightweight) in
the future.

> Cheers,
> Olivier.

Benedikt