[sugar] frame auto-visibility configuration

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 7:25 PM, Eduardo H. Silva <hoboprimate at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow, just tried Erik's instructions for using xcompmgr, and it's
> amazing how swift the frame slides, and how I don't see any screen
> redraws. The experience is totally more fluid. Does it degrade overall
> performance? If not much, and if that performance degradation could be
> recovered in another area in Sugar (general performanfe improvements),
> I'd vote for this to exist in joyride and even part of future stable
> builds.

AFAIK, the only tradeback (and the reason why it hasn't been activated
yet) is that we must pay composition with increased memory usage.
Composition basically saves us unnecessary redraws by keeping in
memory copies of the windows contents.

Martin Dengler did back in March an excellent job quantifying this tradeback:

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-March/004718.html

I'd vote for activating composition ASAP once we have a 9.1 joyride
branch and see how we can find the sweetest spot between speed and
memory usage.

Regards,

Tomeu