Subject: speed (?) of window moves

From: Amir Chossrow Akhavan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 15:47:38 -0700 (PDT)

Hi!

I've noticed it for some time, but thought it might be the price I
have to pay for fancy decorations: 
Window movements are not smooth, it's more a jumping from point to
point, everything looks like on a butt slow machine. 
It's really bad for opaque moves, but the rubberband movements are not
convincing either.
My box has reasonable speed, graphics board, and RAM (Celeron 400A,
384MB, Millennium 2 PCI with 12 MB WRAM), and in fact if I start KDE, 
or enlightenment, the window movements are smooth with immediate response.

I've tried a number of things like renicing fvwm2 or
using real time scheduling, but nothing helps.
I've also run fvwm2 with default window styles (no pixmaps at all),
but it doesn't make a difference (as it ideally should not ;) ).
Also, playing with various style settings didn't seem to help at all.

I accidentally started into fvwm (1.xx) today and noticed that its
really VERY fast compared to fvwm2. 

Another thing I've found is that windows without decorations (like
x11amp, or a borderless and transparent Eterm) show much smoother opaque
moves than windows with deco (but again independent of the presence of
pixmaps in the window border decorations). 
Also, windows of applications which geometry settings are defined in
lines and chars, not in pixels, are particularly slow (e.g. xterm,
or emacs, as opposed to xview).
The faster the moves, the less smooth the moves get.

Interestingly, when I run fvwm2.2 (not CVS because of xpm-lib 
incompatibilities) on a really slow DEC 3000, movements appear much
smoother.

Is there a philosophy behind this?
I thought the idea could have been to prevent the usual tear-off effects
because X cannot easily synchronize its events to the vertical retrace
of the monitor electron beam (and uses double buffering instead). 
But I don't really have a clue about this ;)

CVS: 2.3.6, July 16th
RH Linux 5.2, Kernel 2.2.10
XFree86-3.3.3.1-1

This is all more about elegance, and not so much about functionality,
although my impression is that something in the design IS broken.

thanx, Amir

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