[Clfswm-devel] Pain caused by daily use.

[Renaud Casenave-Péré]

Hi,

On Tue, May 27 2014, Philippe Brochard wrote:

> Michaël Cadilhac writes:
>
>> 1. This is the slowest WM I've ever used.  After some hours of use,
>> switching between two windows can take up to 8 seconds on my arguably
>> modest laptop, and 5 seconds on a quad core "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3470
>> CPU @ 3.20GHz".  This is crazy.  When I get lost in my window tree, —
>> and that still happens quite a lot since lots of times I just avoid
>> creating a tree to not wait minutes to go from windows to windows —
>> I'm in pain and sadness.  As when you burn bread in a toaster.  Oh the
>> sour pain.  What can I do?  (I tried nicing it.)
>>
> Wow, this is really weird. You've a laptop at least twice more powerful
> than mine (acer aspire one, 1,66GHz, 1Gb ram) and I don't experience the
> same problems. So I think there is something wrong in your setup.
>
> First, can you tell us what is your OS, your lisp implementation, your
> CLX implementation and your clfswm version. Do you use xcompmgr for
> transparency? Do you use toolbars?
>
> Personally, I use clisp+portable clx[1] under Debian stable and always the
> last git version with no transparency and no toolbars.
>
> Second, once you see some lags, please can you investigate and report
> the CPU and memory usage of CLFSWM ? (top will be enough in a first
> time).

clfswm may not be the fastest WM I have seen but my experience is nowhere like
Michaël's and I have "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz" as cpu. This may
be related to your graphics card, I use a GeForce GT 440 with the proprietary
drivers.

For a problem not directly related to clfswm (tearing in videos or in games), I
tried using compton, a composition manager and it really slowed it down but I
don't know if it is clfswm's fault or just a bag compton's configuration.

I use sbcl and quicklisp's version of clx and git (not the latest but close
enough: 2ee0a21) version of clfswm.

>> 2.  I rely on the popup console for quite a few background things
>> (music, ssh proxy, ...).  This has two main bugs.  First, when it
>> takes more than 4 seconds to pop up, the focus is not put on the
>> console, but rather stays on the background window.  Quickly removing
>> and repopping the window usually assures that it displays quickly
>> enough to get focused.  It thus takes me a good 10 seconds and some
>> frustration to just pause the music.  Second, when there is more than
>> one window on the screen, I have to be focused on a specific one for
>> the console to even have a chance to get the focus.
>>
> There is effectively a bug here about the focus. I'll have a look. 
> But there is something really weird to have to wait 4 seconds to have
> the xterm pop up. 
> You'll have to investigate here to. On my laptop (even on a Debian live
> booted from an iso image from a usb key), I get the xterm pop up nearly
> instantaneously.
> How many times does it takes to start an xterm for you with another
> window manager (I like icewm for comparison).

Michaël, what focus-policy do you use? I sometimes have focus problems with the
:sloppy-select-window focus-policy and wanted to investigate a bit myself before
reporting it here but I still haven't taken the time...

Apart from that, I don't have much problem using clfswm as my main WM.

-- 
Renaud Casenave-Péré