Re: [xmonad] XMonad Efficiency

Brandon Allbery [2012.04.17 1344 -0400]:

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:21, Allen S. Rout wrote:

On 04/16/2012 03:09 PM, Norbert Zeh wrote:

At this point, I'm simply pondering what can be done about it, as one of the reason's I'm using xmonad is that I want a lightweight desktop environment. (When fast focus changes drive one of my cores to 50%, that's hardly lightweight.)

Wait till you make a quick traverse, start typing, and find bits of your input scattered among several terminals, including a root shell.

Not saying xmonad's behavior is acceptable, but... I see this on OS X somewhat regularly (abusing a MacBook Air as if it were a high end desktop).

(I am starting to think that http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id= 494 is a priority.)

Well, they are somewhat related, but I think the issue I'm talking about here has a much more straightforward fix than trying to generate pure approximations of layouts that can generate their exact answer only impurely. My idea was to keep a Map that associates a rectangle with each window ID (actually a list + offline sorting is enough and may be faster). After calculating the layout, we tell the X server to reconfigure a window only if it wasn't present the last time we refreshed the screen or its physical rectangle has changed. This creates a bit of overhead inside xmonad but should reduce the traffic to the X server substantially, at least for focus updates. It remains to be seen whether this shifts the 50% CPU usage from X into xmonad or whether the total is actually reduced. Cheers, Norbert