Re: Cumulative problem?

On Tuesday 17 February 2009 14:22:11 Anne Wilson wrote:
> I mentioned yesterday that I had changed the Desktop Effects backend from
> OpenGL to XRender.  The improvement was immediate, and startling.  I still
> want another day or two to be absolutely certain, but it looks as though
> most of the performance problems have gone.  KMail doesn't take those long
> pauses any more.  X and kwin still top the list of cpu users, but they now
> take 10-12% cpu between them.
>
> I know that other people may have quite different factors, but in the light
> of my experience this is something that  is definitely worth checking out.

Thanks for the tip. For the record I describe my experiences after one day of  
XRender usage:

- applications are working much smoother, thanks!
- KWin and other 3D effects are slower
- even with extra smoothing quality of effects is a bit lower than with OpenGL 
rendering; for example with OpenGL smoothing I was able to easily read text on 
web pages or Konsole tabs in Windows present thumbs, with XRender it is hard 
or in some cases impossible.

So, there are some trade-offs but XRender option is very good alternative for 
people experiencing problems with default OpenGL rendering.

Also I noticed that in many cases (but not all!) Konqueror freezing when 
connection may be caused by nspluginviewer. In big majority of cases I was 
able to "fix" things with `kill -2`.

m.