Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday 21 February 2007 21:30, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Wednesday 2007-02-21 at 21:06 -0600, Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday 21 February 2007 01:24, John Andersen wrote:
I've often wondered, but never took any measures to find out, what the memory use implications of many many desktops was?
Assuming minimal wallpaper (or none), is it more efficient to use more desktops or more apps on fewer desktops? Every window has to be backed up for the time you don't see it. So, it depends how large are windows is there any gain if you have lesser desktops and more windows per desktop. They are not backed, they are fully redrawn. I mean, applications in the "other" workspace do not use image memory, they are "out of display" or something. I know, or I guess, because if you have an application that takes a long time to redraw, like OOo, and you jump to its workspace, you see it blank and then it starts to redraw. The other method, giving it a virtual display, would use more resources and memory, but jumping would be way faster.
At least, that's how they behave in gnome.
-- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
They use some memory anyway :-)
It seems that it depends on available graphic memory. With 256 MB card switch between desktops is instantenuous without redrawing. The older with 4 MB is showing what you described.
X provides two mechanisms by which parts of images that are not visible can be maintained: backing store and save unders. But, the X server is not required to provide them and will in any case generally limit them according to some memory constraint (e.g. graphic memory size). So applications have to be able to deal with complete redraws anyway. What actually happens depends both on the amount of memory and on the implementation of the servers, clients (i.e. applications) and window managers. There could be config settings in any of them. Remember the X motto: "mechanism not policy" :) A very sharp double-edged sword. Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org