Menus: unnecessary repaints?!

[Dik Takken]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Karl Vogel wrote:

> > When I am using KDE via a slow internet connection, I can see lots of
> > things that look like more work is done than is needed to draw stuff.
> > I would recommend all kde-optimize people to try this yourself.
>
> Problem is that people don't have low bandwidth in mind when designing. (ie
> good example here is how Konsole works.. when the screen scrolls, the
> entire text is repainted, instead of just doing a scroll + repaint of the
> new line -- this might make the implementation more abstract, but it's a
> killer on low bandwidth connections)

Agreed, but you can use low-bandwidth connections to spot drawing
bottlenecks. Not just in order to make KDE run fast on slow connections,
but also to make KDE paint faster when running on a fast local X server.
The speed-ups may not be visible then, but is would make KDE 'feel'
snappier. Its psychological, but that does not mean that it's unimportant!

An extreme example, when you pull down a menu from the menu-bar of
Konqueror and start dragging the mouse across the menubar, KDE can't
keep up drawing each menu being pulled down and restoring the
webpage at the background of the previous menu. It feels quite sluggish.
When you do the same with Mozilla, you will notice a large speed
improvement. Apparantly, KDE needs much more drawing operations to do the
same thing.



> But this problem with the menu's just seems wrong. I can't think of any
> reason why repainting the entire menu is necessary.
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