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GTK2 tray applets a problem?

April 23, 2008 — BarryK
A couple of people have noted that Blinky is using twice the resources that it uses in 3.01. The reason for this is that Blinky in 3.01 is a GTK1 application and I ported it to GTK2 for Dingo.

The other GTK2 tray applet in Dingo is the volume control.

Does anyone think that the amount of resources that these are using will cause noticeable performance degradation on older PCs?

If so, then we should be looking at rewriting them to use Xlib only. There is already an earlier version of the volume control which uses Xlib.

Comments

blinky daemon


Volume control
Username: ANOSage
"Yes. I've had a problem with the VC - it can only be set to zero or 100% recently. As for gizmos, remove them - the big push has to be towards the 25Mb .iso target of SliTaz or 1.44Mb of Kolibri, albeit with assembler coding.

revert the volume control
Username: HairyWill
"I would be happy to see the volume control reverted. I've learnt a lot about gtk programming in creating it but its memory cost is too high. I've written it as efficiently as I know how. I suppose GTK applications have a fixed minimum memory use and I don't think there is anyway to reduce that. Also my understanding of the sound system is somewhat limited so I find it hard to fix individuals problems. As by default it provides no monitoring capability there is no functional need for the volume control to be a daemon at all. It could just be an application launched by a TrayButton which can be placed on either the left or the right side of the tray.

revert the volume control
Username: HairyWill
"grr the maximum 1000 characters per post is rather limiting Reverting to the original absvolume not to work as a trayicon but as a fixed icon traybutton using my cut down slider design and having it die on focus wouldn't be hard. There would be no memory or cpu usage unless you were using it but you would have the startup cost each time you clicked it and the memory/cpu usage whilst using the slider would only be reduced slightly. I'm happy to put in the minimal effort to do the conversion but don't really mind either way.

Re: volume control
Username: BarryK
"Will, Thanks for your constructive comments regarding the volume control. Yes, the "fixed icon traybutton" idea seems good. Well, I'm aiming for 4.00 final to be out by about 3rd - 5th of May, so not looking at any major coding at this stage. Your GTK2 applet is nice... for me personally though, your original version is quite satisfactory.

minimal volume control
Username: HairyWill
"Here we go paired down to the minimum. It can be started from a jwm button. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wmd04r/puppy/AbsVolume-1.0-puppy-0.9-minimal.tgz 7K stripped. I should have started here ;-)

Blinky
Username: kirk
"Barry, I sent you a PM that has another version of Blinky attached. Top shows it using 2% memory and 0% cpu.


Tags: puppy