🚀 go-pugleaf

1. The Theory

It seems that one of the reasons that 3.0 is sluggish on a color machine  
is the use (overuse?) of color in almost all windows.  If you could turn  
off color except in those applications that really needed color, maybe it  
would make 3.0 zipper??

2. One Way to Try It

You can "turn off" color on an application-by-application basis by using  
the following (documented!) dwrite:

name    : NXWindowDepthLimit
settings: "TwoBitGray","EightBitGray","TwelveBitRGB","TwentyFourBitRGB"

What I have done is to turn off color by default in ALL applications with:

    dwrite -g NXWindowDepthLimit TwoBitGray

Log out, log in, and voila, you're back to the basic monochrome look.  You  
probably don't want monochrome in all applications (why did you buy a  
color machine?), so you can reenable color selectively, ie:

    dwrite GoldDigger NXWindowDepthLimit TwelveBitRGB

to reenable color for the GoldDigger application.

The easiest way to play with these things is via the DefaultMgr  
application available on the archives.  The EightBitGray option looks  
quite nice, but doesn't save much memory over 12 bit color.

3. The Results

It's hard to test this.  The Winfo program (a miniexample, I believe)  
makes it easy to see that a lot of memory is being saved in programs with  
color windows that are normally large (ie. Workspace, Librarian), because  
of the reduced size of the backing store.  Perhaps someone with better  
knowledge of the guts of the Window server could tell me if this technique  
is actually reducing memory usage, or if it just appears that way.

After working in semi-monochrome for a couple of hours, it "seems"  
considerably faster to pop back and forth between windows, and swapping  
"seems" to be reduced.

Have others tried this technique before?  Is my machine really going  
faster, or am I just light-headed from hunger late on a Friday afternoon?


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Gary Ritchie
gary@uaneuro.uah.ualberta.ca