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:
> try turning off the icons and see if that improves

Yes. Icons definitely appear to cause the problem.

So, in summary:

When the panel has been idle for a while, it normally purges the menus from
memory. This is very good, especially on low-memory machines.
Unfortunately, if the panel goes unused for a number of hours, recreating
the menus becomes very expensive.

On a 233MHz machine, it takes about three seconds to open the main menu
when I first start working in the morning. Two workarounds cause noticable
improvement:

 * Turning off icons.
 * Turning off menu purging.

Two possible solutions might be:

 * Cache the icons even after the menus are purged. This might take up
   considerably less RAM than caching the entire menus.
 * Display the menu with no icons when necessary, and add the icons into
   the open menu as they get loaded from disk. This might be a bit tricky
   to do--you'd probably have to use a transparent icon-sized graphic and
   change it while the menu is open. Is this possible with Gtk+?

Cheers,
Eric