Re: Pager background patch2
sashav (sashav@sprintmail.com)
Tue, 18 Aug 1998 07:26:54 -0500
Ethan wrote:
>
> On Sun, 16 Aug 1998, sashav wrote:
>
> > backgr2fast in addition feature new technique in showing non-XPM
> > files as background. It runs external application to show
> > background first time, then, when you change desktop it grabs
> > background image from desktop and uses it afterwards, when you switch
> > back, instead of running external application again. It is much faster.
> > To do that indeed I needed to do minor change to afterstep -
> > if you run application from different desktop, it now first creates
> > window,and only then changes desktop. I don't think that there
> > will be any problems with that, but just in case you wouldn't want that
> > change, I've included 'slow' version that does not provide this new
> > functionality.
> >
> > Both patches goes on 1.5pre7 clean distribution (without patch1
> > installed).
>
> Hmm, the background grabbing is not a good feature on my system. It eats
> 932k of memory when the backing pixmap is allocated. That's more than
> the AfterStep process uses! It is much faster, but the memory overhead
> is too high, IMO.
The Pager has always been storing pixmaps of background in memory, so if
you
are using the full screen picture you should not see any difference.
The only time you will have a problem with that, is when you tile your
background with much smaller image. In this case you'll lose memory as
far as
the whole screen will be grabbed.
I think, it is sensible to introduce one more setting into pager
configuration,
like this :
*PagerFastBackground 0 yes
*PagerFastBackground 0 yes <hsize> <vsize>
*PagerFastBackground 0 no
with default set to 'no', and default hsize, vsize set to screen size.
That will let turn this feature on only for selected desktops
(those that you use more often) to save up memory, and also will provide
efficient way of grabbing only portion of screen (HSIZExVSIZE) instead
of the
whole.
Sasha