Windows

[thant at horus.sgi.com]

Howdy,

Yeah, the window manager uses a good hunk of cpu when you're using it
(crossing window boundaries, moving windows around, context switching, etc.), 
but if there is only one window the size of the screen the only thing the 
window manager would have to do is check the mouse position against a (very 
short) window segment list.  I've got a feeling that in this condition the 
window manager uses even less than 5% of the cpu.

4.5 meg of window manager would be a real pain on a minimal system.  But if
there was only one window the size of the screen I would
think that the window manager would get mostly swapped out and not swapped
back in because nothing could happen if no window borders were crossed.
This is the stuff that is black magic to me, but I wonder if people have
tried this just to check.

To tell you the truth, i think there are people working on a minimalist 
window manager.  I think it's a bad idea.  Yeah, you didn't have to run mex
on the 3000, but the fact that some of the stuff ran with the window manager
and some of the stuff didn't was an endless source of headaches for SGI and
customers.

I think the answer is to make the window manager as painless as possible by
increasing its performance and decreasing its size.  One thing they are 
working on is getting it to use the shared GL.  This will decrease its size
a lot.

thant at sgi.com

P.S.  I'm not a part of the window manager group so I obviously am not 
speaking for them.