Re: Look at what the panel does now before discussing what it should do!!

[Eric Kidd <eric kidd pobox com>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 01:37:58AM -0700, George wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 10:06:44AM -0400, Eric Kidd wrote:
> > I just clicked on the foot and waited three seconds before the menu
> > appeared. Some of the submenus took close to a second. My machine is not
> > *too* slow (233MHz, 128MB of RAM), and none of my other applications have
> > started swapping.
> 
> try turning off the icons and see if that improves

Yes. The icons appear to be most of the problem. I'll experiment further
over the next few days (I only get to test this once or twice a day, for
obvious reasons).
 
> > Where is all this time going? Have all the *.desktop files been flushed
> > from my block cache? What information can I provide to help isolate the
> > problem?
> 
> the .desktop information is never flushed,

I know. But if the inodes of the *.desktop files get purged from the block
cache, stat'ing them will require a trip to disk. But I don't think that
this is the problem here.

> what is flushed are the menu widgets, and with them the icons, without
> this, the panel can grow to rediculous memory requirements. You can turn
> off the menu widget flushing though. Unless the .desktop files actually
> change, nothing is reread. so we there is absolutely no problem with
> that, nor the stat times, we need some way to cache the icons or
> something, if that is the bottleneck.

This is probably the right approach. Ideally, the default settings would:

  * Show icons (they look good).
  * Not gobble memory.
  * Provide a fast response when the panel hasn't been used recently.

I'm only obsessing about this because the panel is so important to the
whole "Gnome experience." :-) Overall, the panel is the best application
launcher I've seen anywhere.

Cheers,
Eric