On 12/15/2009 06:33 AM, Will Stephenson wrote:
Was the presence of this dynamic menu cache an interesting feature for you compared to other WMs/lightweight DEs or also compared to KDE/GNOME?
Will, yes it was and you can tell the difference immediately in the crispness of the menus. This is especially true in a lot of the lightweight desktop using xdg-menu, dmenu, wall-menu or the like. With the number of packages installed today, without a cache, you have a lot of perceptible "lag" time between clicking on the menu and the menu appearing. Anything over a 1/4 second and you really notice, you get to 1/2 and you find yourself waiting...
I ask because KDE has had a cache here since KDE 2 (sycoca, generated by kbuildsycoca4, which it rebuilds when you edit things in kmenuedit or change file associations and it puts up a 'Rebuilding system configuration' progress dialog, and I wonder if its performance improvements are being lost by some other part of KDE4 underperforming...
I have always thought they introduced the menu animations to cover-up or hide a bit of the menu read/display lag. With kde (I haven't tried this lately), I would always go disable all the menu animations and menu effects (fade-in/out, transparency, etc..) and then check the way the menus behaved. With kde3, I always found the menus were instantaneous without the effects, so I just went to a policy of setting all the animation timings to about 75% which produced a crisp but elegant menu animation without any perceived delay: slow +-------------------------|----------+ fast I have always found that KDE( 3 & 4 ) set the default timings way to slow and it did give the impression that the menus (and desktop in general) was sluggish. There is no question about it, kde4 feels like a behemoth compared to kde3 and I suspect a lot of it is due to a lack of attention to the compounding effects the many different animations/fades/etc.. have on each other. At its core, kde4 should just zip along as well as, or better than, kde3 did, but if you add .02 of shade, .03 of expand, .04 of gradient, etc... 8 times over for each window, menu and entry, the delays really starts to add up. I don't know what kind of profiling has been done just looking into the menu generation and menu animation timings, but I suspect with all of the rush to get everything working, not much attention has been paid to the technical polish of the interface. Yet another area for you to add your name to the KDE historical record for another significant improvement to the desktop ;-) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org