Desktop quibbles (Performance Tweaks and Enhancements)

[Ben Russo]

Marc Williams wrote:

>3) When having multiple windows open on the desktop and trying to move
>from one to another, clicking on the title bar of a window underneath
>should just give it focus.  However, what it seems to do is grab that
>window (as in moving it) and won't let go until I click it again.  I
>don't like that behavior at all and it seems different than all previous
>versions of RH I've run.  If this is configurable, how do I turn it off
>so that it behaves the way it used to?
>  
>

Several things I did that made the situation much better....

I had lousy responsiveness with FC1, even on a box with a
1.7GHz P4,   512MB DDR RAM,  AGP video that supports
decent (not great) DRI acceleration (glxgears gives 600+ fps)
I also found that Xwindows redraws were ugly, that scrolling
and moving windows was choppy, and jerky, and that the
screen frequently got all messed up. Moving windows stuck
to the mouse and mouse click status got out of synch...
Arghh..  I thought my mouse was broken or something. 
It felt like I had a system whose resourses were being fought over.

---  *WARNING*  some of these things may break your
        machine's filesystem, so be carefull.

1.  edit /boot/grub/grub.conf, add "idebus=66" to the lnes that have 
"kernel"
      as the first word, for example:

             kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl ro  \
                root=LABEL=/1 hdc=ide-scsi rhgb idebus=66

2.  edit /etc/sysconfig/hardisk and made sure that the following
        options were set  *WARNING* these could break your filesystem

            USE_DMA=1
            MULTIPLE_IO=16
            EIDE_32BIT=3
            LOOKAHEAD=1
            EXTRA_PARAMS="-u1 -X68"


3.  set "noatime" on the filesystems in /etc/fstab that are ext2 or ext3
                (I've never needed it on a desktop anyway)
    and also set "data=writeback" for the filesystems as well.  
        (heck I never even had problems with ext2, and this supposedly
          still keeps the filesystem metadata in tact)

4.  Edited my /etc/X11/XF86Config
       This is going to be a little different for everybody,
                 depending on what video chipset you
          are running,  but read the documentation for DRI in
            XFree86,  http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.1/DRI.html

       You may find that you can get much better performance
            for your video card, and reduce CPU utilization
             with a few tweaks
       My system has an Intel 845GL onboard video chipset.
       X DRI support is there with the i810 module which was
       autodetected by FC1, but FC1 set the color depth to 24,
       and the X docs I read said that DRI only has affect in 16bit
          mode.

          Also, I set "VideoRAM 16384" in the config file.  I don't
          know what X was grabbing before, but this was recommended
          in the XFree86 DRI documentation.

5.  CHANGE AWAY FROM METACITY.

       God metacity sucked.  It was terrible.
          RedHat/Fedora integrated it beautifully
          with the desktop and and the configuration tools.
       And it worked beautifully with all the themes.
       But it was just so slow at raising and resizing and moving
          windows around.  And it did redraws and rebuilds of windows
          so choppily and jerky, that it hurt to watch.

       You can replace metacity with WindowMaker or XFCE4 or ICEWM
          for example.

       Just install one of those other window managers, then start X
          and run " killall metacity; icewm & ; gnome-session-save" (for 
example)
       Then go figure out how to configure your window decoration themes
          and turn off Opaque Window moves and resizes.
     
          You could do the same thing with XFCE4 or WindowMaker....

6.  Run the /etc/cron.daily/prelink job

7.  Use "chckconfig --list | grep :on" and turn off all those things 
that you
       don't need.  Most people probably aren't using md or rawdevices
       or pcmcia or isdn, and if you are like me, you only need KUDZU
       after you install the system (I don't muck with my hardware that 
much).

7.  Reboot to take affect the IDEBUS kernel change, and the filesystem 
changes
       and to restart X and such.

Now I may have only shaved 10-20% off the bootup time.
And how long it takes from power on to when I have MOZILLA or EVOLUTION or
OOWRITER open and typing may only have saved about 10-20 seconds.

But, the fixes with window management and the smooth scrolling,
smooth resizing, smooth moving windows and much faster responsiveness
to keystrokes and mouse movements (I assume because of disk I/O blocking
tuning and interupt tuning and video card tuning???) 

The box FEELS and LOOKS  much better than before, even if it is only
10-20% faster in the bootup, first load phase.

I would even go as far to say that after the box is up and running for a 
few days
as a workstation,  it is probably the same overall speed as an identical
box without these tweaks (because everything would be loaded in RAM
anyway).  But the box would still feel smoother and look smoother and
that makes it much less frustrating.

Also the mouse sticking on windows moving is GONE.

-Ben.