[comp.windows.x] Redrawing the Root background...

don@zardoz.coral.COM (Don Dewar) (01/20/91)

I have a rather naive question...

Recently I brought down the newest version of xloadimage (hot stuff, I
had more fun that I have had in weeks).  For something really *cool*
to do, I made the red dragon gif image my root background -- looks
great.  But I am puzzled by something.  When I move, let's say an
icon, it disappears and reappears with no perceptible difference in
reponse over what it would have done with a bland background.  When I
uniconfy the icon, however, it slowly erases the icon from the bottom
and when it is done is pops up the window as handy as you please.  I
am using mwm on a SPARC SunOS 4.1.  Could someone explain to me the
difference?

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gildea@expo.lcs.mit.EDU (Stephen Gildea) (01/24/91)

Using xloadimage to put a large picture in your root creates a large
pixmap which the server must page in whenever it needs to expose more
of the root (as when you unmap or move a window).  How long it takes
is highly non-deterministic, as it depends on many factors such as how
much is paged out and how many other processes are running at the moment.
Perhaps the slowness you see when deiconifying a window is due to the
server competing for resources with the application, which must now
process its expose event(s).

 < Stephen
   MIT X Consortium