Nick Wright wrote:
I have been using the open box window manager with Firefox (Debian unstable with kernel 2.6.16 (preempt on)) on an AMD 3500+ & 2 gigabytes of RAM. I also notice the same behavior. The video card is a 7900GTX PCI-express with the latest NVIDIA driver , 1.0-8762 driver. The problem was much worse with open source drivers and one of several (7500 AGP DVI, 9000 Pro DVI, 9250 DVI) ATI cards. Things seemed a little better with the open nv driver, and slightly better still with the nvidia driver. An example of a website that gave me serious headaches was www.eham.net. Painfully slow scrolling with the ATI cards. The CPU still gets pegged at 100% with the nvidia driver, but scrolls much (click on the product reviews link to bring your browser to a crawl) faster. Scrolling between desktops in openbox, I can watch as the inside of the firefox window is being redrawn; same for most GTK2 apps. Openbox draws the window decorations instantly, so I doubt is a window manager issue.I use fluxbox as my window manager. Its pretty sweet for most stuff -- light and fast. However when scrolling around in firefox the system is brought to its knees (CPU load spikes to 80-90%). This also happens quite a bit when altering the focus between firefox and other windows. I use a focus-on-mouse-pointer setup which means the focus can shift quite quickly a number of times which can exacerbating the problem. The video card is a pci geforce 2 which is reasonable for 2D performance. This is a (dual) P3 system at 866mhz. Does anyone else find the same thing? Can you recommend any alternatives to firefox that perform better in fluxbox (and obviously is as featureful as possible) Cheers, Nick
The 7900GTX is driving a IBM l200p flat panel to 1600x1200 resolution. The strange thing is, these apps are much snappier on my Thinkpad x41 with integrated Intel grpahics and a 1024x768 LCD. The eHam website was never much of a problem as far as scrolling. So I wonder if the performance hit is a combination of high resolution and GTK2 apps. I posted an inquiry a while back on this list, never got a response.
I never seem to have any issues with QT apps like K3B or K9copy though. Nick