Re: how to write snappy benchmark?

Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-07-05 at 11:56, Marko Macek wrote:

>>$ while true ; do xrefresh ; sleep 0.1 ; done
>>1) observe repaints. Ideally, nothing on the screen will blink
>>(the only app I can find that does this right is Mozilla,
>>mostly by my efforts).
> 
> Note that the reason that Mozilla doesn't blink is the same
> reason:
> 
>  A) When you switch to the desktop with Mozilla on it and
>     Mozilla is swapped out, you see Mozilla slowly appear
>     out of whatever you had before, often first as a blinking
>     cursor in the URL line.

Yes, this happens with unresponsive applications. But we shouldn't
penalize the responsive ones.

A solution would be an extension to X server/protocol that repainted
the window after a specified timeout expired (>0.5 seconds)


>  B) Windows dragged over Mozilla's content area leave huge
>     ugly trails of window border bits.

This also only happens when the application can't keep up with 
repainting. This is either on slow hardware, unfair scheduling in
X/kernel or inefficient repaint algorithm in the app or toolkit.

(it's quite visible in mozilla mailnews folder pane, but not
at all in the browser).

> Some of us consider not blinking in Mozilla's way a distinctly
> bad thing. 

It's a tradeoff. My way, the repaints are faster and they happen
only once (no blinking), but they are slightly delayed on slower
machines.

Mark