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window-maker / wmaker

Mirror of the official repository repo.or.cz/wmaker-crm.git. Do not send pull requests here, send your patches to wmaker-dev@googlegroups.com instead
https://repo.or.cz/wmaker-crm.git
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Slow workspace switching #5

Open cme opened 3 years ago

cme commented 3 years ago

Version: 0.95.8 System: Raspbian, Raspberry Pi 4

I recently upgraded to a higher resolution monitor, and found that switching workspaces now takes ~1 second. While there was a barely noticable delay before, at 2048x1600 it's painful, so I investigated.

The time is taken within wWorkspaceMapUpdate, which updates the workspace's image for the workspace map.

I tend to switch workspaces frequently, but have never used the workspace map. I didn't even know it existed, and it's not bound to any key (the only way to reach it, it seems from inspecting the source) on the default configuration. I've tried binding a key to that command (on a different system, an Ubuntu x86 VM), and it doesn't actually seem to have any effect (though I haven't investigated why).

So it seems quite wrong to slow down a frequent operation for the sake of a very rare one!

Potential approaches to improve:

  1. Don't update previews if workspace map isn't bound to any key (=> the workspace map is inaccessible)
  2. Don't update preview until the workspace map is constructed / shown for the first time
  3. Use a faster method of scaling down image to preview (this seems to take about half the excess time)
  4. Defer scaling operation until after the workspace switch has completed, to minimise user-observed latency (would approximately half the response time)
  5. Use COMPOSITE. This is probably a more radical change but would likely solve the issue entirely.
gryf commented 3 years ago

Should we close this as well, or do we want to keep it in case someone else could have a performance issue?