Follow-up Comment #3, bug #34202 (project xboard): Thank-you. Following your advice (your last paragraph), I now have the least startup delay ever achieved from other changes suggested by h.g. muller, and Arun Persaud. With NLS disabled, I now get a 1.8-second delay with the medium xboard size, 16-bit color depth, Ubuntu 11.04, and both Thunderbird and Firefox running in separate virtual desktops. The delay is 1.0-seconds without Thunderbird and Firefox running in the background to add loading to the xorg graphics system.
As you may know, color depth is the largest factor effecting the startup delay caused by xorg. The attached data (RTF) files shows the effects of color depth and various board sizes. You will notice that for xboard-4.4.4, the best result is 4-seconds with the smallest board size (Medium) and 16-bit color depth that I am practically able to tolerate. The 2 + 2 = 4 represents the first and second delays (render the chessboard graphic + complete text in the xboard window and be ready to run). After the attached data was measured, an improved total delay of 2.7-seconds was achieved using xboard-4.5.3a with a patch to xboard.c as suggested by h.g. muller: if(gameInfo.variant != VariantNormal) gameInfo.boardWidth = 0; (replaces code "gameInfo.boardWidth = 0;" line 2628 in xboard.c for 4.5.3a) Although the latest/newest version suggested (ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/xboard/xboard-4.6.0.20111203.tar.gz) with the "./configure --disable-nls" change applied does produce the least delay (1.8/1.0) on my computer, I found that the pleasing woodgrain texture of the 4.5.3a version chessboard is lost with the 4.6.0.20111203 version that has plain green/yellow colors for the chessboard. I therefore tried the disable-nls configure change on version 4.5.3a and then added the "if(gameInfo.variant != VariantNormal) gameInfo.boardWidth = 0;" patch to xboard.c. To my surprise, it has the same 1.8/1.0-second delay and just looks better, so that's what I'm using now. Any explanation of what I might be doing wrong to lose the woodgrain chessboard in the latest 4.6 version would be appreciated since I do like the idea of keeping up with the latest version. Again, thanks from a happy camper with the 1.0 to 1.8-sec delay that is much improved over the original 40-second delay with only a slight reduction in graphic quality and board size. I'm going back to mostly playing chess, but would be happy to test any future improvements in xboard since I have a system that is sensitive to xboard start-up start-up delays that I know does not effect all other computers for some reason. PS- will also try to post this message to: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?34202> --Dick (file #24654) _______________________________________________________ Additional Item Attachment: File name: xboard-delay-vs-boardsize.rtf Size:8 KB _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?34202> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/ _______________________________________________ Bug-XBoard mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-xboard
