[Konsole-devel] [Bug 69587] session tabs flicker too much with "Monitor for Activity"

Casey Allen Shobe cshobe at softhome.net
Wed Dec 3 21:33:44 UTC 2003


On Wed, December 03 2003 11:26, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> ------- Additional Comments From thiagom at mail.com  2003-12-03 17:26 -------
> I should point out that it doesn't seem to me to be the same as bugs #66779
> and #58040. Those relate to the session screen flickering its background
> (from what I gathered), while my problem is related to the tabs themselves.

It seems to me that there are a *lot* of bugs, which although different, are 
the same problem - things on the screen being updated unecessarily and thus 
causing excessive delays, flicker, and so on.  I have personally seen many 
scenarios where this is a problem for me.  I'm CC'ing core-devel because I 
believe many of these issues lie in kdelibs, and kde-devel because these 
issues constantly appear in all different KDE applications.

A few examples:

1.  In the above comment, we can see that the tab content is being refreshed 
any time that there *may* be a change, rather than any time there *is* a 
change.  This is the meat of the problem.

2.  On my 125MHz sparcstation, the image being redrawn to the left of the 
K-menu every time the selection changes makes the menu *very* slow and nearly 
unusable, so I have to disable the image.

3.  When using KDE over a 10Mb link using X11, when typing in the Konqueror 
URL bar or any other field with the completion set to dropdown, I can see the 
dropdown list being redrawn every time I type a letter, even if the content 
does not change.  Instead the menu should only be redrawn if the entirety of 
the content changes.

4.  When using KDE locally on my P4 with a 64Mb video card in programs with 
tables of constantly updating content (i.e. KMLDonkey), the issues are still 
visable, since every time *any* content is updated (about once a second), 
*all* of it is redrawn, in this case causing the entire table to flicker 
every second.  Instead only the specific fields in the table which have 
changed should be updated.

These problems are more visable the slower the processor or network link or 
video card support, however even running locally on a fast machine these 
problems are cumulative and make KDE look & feel slow and unresponsive.  So I 
would just like to ask people to bear the pedantic-update situation in mind 
in whatever things they work on.  Too often I fear that people update too 
much/often to prevent bugs from appearing, instead of writing more careful 
and logical updating code to only update when/what necessary.

-- 
Casey Allen Shobe
cshobe at softhome.net
Jabber: sigthor at jabber.org; ICQ: 1494523; AIM/Yahoo: SomeLinuxGuy
Despite the rising cost of living, it remains a popular activity.



More information about the konsole-devel mailing list