Calum Benson wrote: > On 18 Jan 2008, at 17:55, Bob Doolittle wrote: > > >> Brian Cameron wrote: >> >>> Probably the most significant complaints I hear from people migrating >>> from CDE to GNOME are the fact that we don't have a standalone >>> calendar program and session management (the ability to save you >>> workspace and have it start-up as you left it) doesn't work so well >>> in GNOME. >>> >> 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, >> which seemingly are becoming more and more >> prevalent and ingrained with Gnome over time. >> > > I don't believe any of those features are enabled by default in any > version of GNOME that we deliver though, are they? (And if they are, > they shouldn't be.) >
Sure they are. Font anti-aliasing that uses Composite, for instance. Also, much of: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5099/performance-1?l=en (backgrounds that have non-tiled/solid patterns, non-wireframe window moves, ...). Also screensaver hacks. These make sense on a dedicated system, but just because one user on a shared system is idle doesn't mean everybody else should pay the resource cost of playing a hack. The default behavior of Gnome simply is a bad choice for a stateless thin client on a shared system, whereas it might be a fine choice for dedicated hardware with graphics acceleration (assuming you didn't need those resources for other work). It would be nice if there were some system-wide configuration an administrator could easily make which would result in a "thin profile" for the desktop - something that minimized its system impact. It would be great if this config/hint were visible to apps like browsers as well, so that they could adapt their behavior (e.g. indefinite caching of pixmaps which are in non-visible tabs or several pages "Back", which cause enormous bloat in the X server memory footprint). -Bob
