Description of problem: Since I upgraded from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6 I have noticed that windows are redrawn more slowly and scrolling is more sluggish. When new windows are opened the redraws are often visible and sometimes momentarily contain garbage before being overwritten with the correct data. When I open certain pages in Firefox and scroll down with the cursor keys, it takes much longer for the page to scroll to the bottom than in KDE. For example: http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/keyboards/ KDE: 6s Window Maker: 35s http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/ergonomics/office/mouse/mouse_problems.html KDE: 4s Window Maker: 22s This may be improved by restarting the window manager - I need to do some more investigation. Also sometimes artifacts/artefacts of the Window Maker application menus are left behind instead of the menu disappearing altogether. This may well be unrelated to the other problems. I'm not convinced that Window Maker is to blame but I don't have much to go on. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): WindowMaker-0.92.0-10.fc6 How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start X with Window Maker as window manager 2. Open applications such as Thunderbird and Firefox 3. Observe window redraws and scrolling Actual results: Windows should be redrawn quickly, scrolling should be fast and smooth Expected results: Windows are drawn slowly, often filling with garbage before the correct data, scrolling is slow and jerky Additional info:
Hm, I am using wmaker every day and I do not see this behavior not on nvidia cards not on ati cards... Seems to me this is a problem with the graphics driver but it sounds strange that it would work in kde. Please investigate a bit more and get back to me.
That would confirm my suspicion that Window Maker isn't responsible, especially as the software is largely unchanged between fc5 and fc6. I've now tried xfce and twm in addition to KDE and the window redraws are all fine in those environments. As regards graphics drivers, there seems to be a unique problem with mine. That started appearing when I "upgraded" from FC4 to FC5 and is still present in FC6. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204789 However, I don't think this bug is related. Anyway I'll try building my own Window Maker rpm from source and see if I can get any useful debugging out of it. BTW I seem to have muddled up the Actual and Expected results in my comments above but hopefully that's obvious.
You can also grep the debuginfo rpm and try to get some debugging out of the 'official' package. I am sorry that I cannot really help you at the moment. If you have any clues I can follow I'd be glad to help.
I've been making some changes to my xorg.conf in order to resolve other issues and this seems to be down to the setting of DefaultDepth in the "Screen" section. In Fedora Core 5 I had this set to 16 and kept this when upgrading to Fedora Core 6. If I change the depth to 24, performance is a lot better and I don't see the artefacts I mentioned. As a test I timed how long it took to do an ls -l of the /usr/bin directory (2905 lines) within a GNU Screen session under different environments for the two colour depths. The results are as follows: depth 16 -------- Window Maker 54s xfwm4 3s twm 2s KDE 1s depth 24 -------- Window Maker 3s xfwm4 3s twm 3s KDE 1s The error is probably about +/- 1s as I was timing not particularly scientifically with a watch. As you can see, Window Maker is taking considerably longer at a colour depth of 16. I'm happy setting the depth to 24 so this is no longer really an important issue but I'm still curious as to why this is happening and why the performance deteriorated following the upgrade to FC6. It may of course have something to do with my graphics card/monitor combination (Intel 810 / Samsung SyncMaster 171P).
Thanks for reporting back. I just tested this with my laptop (ati, default x radeon driver) and it worked without problems. The ls -ls /usr/bin/ took 4.218 seconds. In case you ever need it take a look at the 'time' command. It can measure running time of programs rather easy. I have no clue why this is happening on your computer but I guess it maybe is some strange combination of i810 and WindowMaker. I am closing this now as cantfix. Feel free to let me know if you find out more. If I find it more I will reopen as well.