Bob: > On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Bob Doolittle wrote: >> I feel I must comment here. Many Sun Ray >> customers have complained about the footprint and >> performance of Gnome, particularly when using >> Composite and Transparency types of features, > > Is this primarily an issue when rendering glyphs or is it a complaint > about rendering the icons? It used to be that glyphs were always > rendered in the X11 server but now it seems that glyphs are rendered > within the application in order to achieve nicer anti-aliased results. > Rendering glyphs within the application obviously increases the amount > of network traffic when using an X11 application remotely.
To my understanding the Sun Ray product typically makes quite a few modifications to the normal GNOME install to improve performance issues that affect its thin client environment. For example, they turn off anti-aliasing of fonts in GNOME. They also use wireframes when moving/resizing windows rather than scaling the actual window over-and-over. I think they also turn off auto-thumbnailing (and similar) in nautilus as a default setting. They also use tuned backgrounds that tile well and a GTK+ theme that takes into consideration Sun Ray performance issues. Unless the Sun Ray sysadmin makes these mandatory configuration settings, users can revert if they want. However, most users probably like the better performance. If icons were really a problem, the Sun Ray team (or someone) could provide their own icon theme with icons tuned for Sun Ray performance. For example, a good looking 8-bit icon theme might be slightly faster over a slow connection. To date, I don't think anybody has thought the work involved with creating such an icon theme would be worth the effort involved. But there's no reason why GNOME couldn't work with such an optimized icon theme if people wanted to create it. Further I am aware that the Sun Ray team is currently working to make the Xorg Xserver and various Xserver extensions (such as Xvideo, Xrender, Xcomposite, etc.) work on Sun Ray. I expect that this will improve performance on Sun Ray further. It is true that many people like to use GNOME with Compiz, but I do not think there are any plans to make Compiz a hard dependency. I think Sun Ray can expect to continue to use GNOME without Compiz without any problems. Brian
