Bug#604087: gnome-terminal: Typing into window is slow with transparency on and compositing disabled

[Mike Hicks]

Package: gnome-terminal
Version: 2.30.2-1
Severity: normal

I have been using gnome-terminal with transparency enabled for many
years on an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ system (technically 2.166 GHz) with a
Matrox G400-series video card.  In recent months, I started noticing
significant lag time while typing in the terminal window.  When I press
and hold the spacebar, the cursor moves in a very jerky motion across
the window.  This becomes very frustrating when I am editing files under
vim.

This jerky motion goes away if I disable transparency.  Surprisingly,
performance also improves to a good level if I enable compositing under
metacity with the command

  gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

Note, that I am *not* running compiz.  I was surprised to discover that
compositing works at all with my video card because it does not support
3D in 24-/32-bit color mode.

Enabling compositing markedly improves the performance of
gnome-terminal, but has a somewhat negative effect on my ability to
smoothly drag windows of other programs around the desktop.  Alt+Tab
with compositing enabled is very slow.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (988, 'testing'), (499, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-3-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages gnome-terminal depends on:
ii  gnome-terminal-data           2.30.2-1   Data files for the GNOME terminal 
ii  libatk1.0-0                   1.30.0-1   The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libc6                         2.11.2-7   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2              0.88-2     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgconf2-4                   2.28.1-5   GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.24.2-1   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0                   2.20.1-2   The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libice6                       2:1.0.6-2  X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libpango1.0-0                 1.28.3-1   Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libsm6                        2:1.1.1-1  X11 Session Management library
ii  libvte9                       1:0.24.3-1 Terminal emulator widget for GTK+ 
ii  libx11-6                      2:1.3.3-3  X11 client-side library

Versions of packages gnome-terminal recommends:
ii  gvfs                     1.6.4-2         userspace virtual filesystem - ser
ii  yelp                     2.30.1+webkit-1 Help browser for GNOME

gnome-terminal suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information


-- 
Mike Hicks <hick0088 at tc.umn.edu>
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