poor desktop performance on compiz

Thanks for your bug. Compiz is a new technology and not part of the default installation yet. We don't have the required ressources to work on that for now and that's an upstream issue, setting it as minor and low priority. If somebody wants to take that upstream he's welcome. That could be nautilus hitting a slow cairo path and so not a nautilus issue, that would not be the first time

Not to mention that your video card is quite old (If I remember the
geforce naming scheme correctly). XGL needs quite a bit of video card
juice...

His card is fast enough, the problem might be the memmory on the card, it is shared with rest of the system, and thus is not a dedicated set of ram-chips.

Because these chips are on the other side of the agp-bus, performance might take a hit if the textures are really big. Are you using a large (as in MB's) desktop wallpaper?

Try removing it, and just using an opaque background color. That might help a lot.
Offcourse testing with a speedier, card with onboard ram would also prove this.

"His card is fast enough, the problem might be the memmory on the card, it is shared with rest of the system, and thus is not a dedicated set of ram-chips.

Because these chips are on the other side of the agp-bus, performance might take a hit if the textures are really big. Are you using a large (as in MB's) desktop wallpaper?"

Not really, my DW weighs exactly 757 Kb. A regular 1280x800 jpg.

"Try removing it, and just using an opaque background color. That might help a lot".

Thanks, but that's the first thing I tried and sadly it didn't work.

"Offcourse testing with a speedier, card with onboard ram would also prove this".

That's totally not a feasible solution. I'm working on a laptop and changing the chipset is not possible. Besides, Compiz does seem to work properly once in a while, seemingly on a random basis. And with the same card.

Is there a way for me to record a video abut my desktop performance, like the ones Novell used to show the features of Compiz? I'd really like you to see the problem with your own eyes.

This sounds an awful lot like bug 36666 (but for a different card and driver). I'll repeat what I said there here:

"For fastest performance a driver has to implement GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap (I may have the exact name of the extension wrong) otherwise this rather critical feature will have to be emulated in software. [...]

Xgl is so new and requires such cutting edge features that problems like these are to be expected.

(This bug should thus not be filed against xgl but instead against the xorg drivers for your card)"

I've seen some movement on this bug, so I should say that this ceased to happen on newer Compiz versions. There are other performance issues of course, but not this particular one.

thank you for the update, marking fixed then