The speed Metacity renders decorations depends on the theme in use. If you want to time all the themes installed and view them, use:
- for G in $(locate metacity-theme-1|grep /usr/share/themes|cut -d/ -f5); do metacity-theme-viewer $G; done
Mean client-side times on my system to draw each frame, in ascending order of speed:
- Prelude (the theme given in the previous post): 1.3ms
- Bright: 1.9ms
- Atlanta: 2.0ms
- Mist: 2.1ms
- AgingGorilla: 2.2ms
- Metabox: 2.2ms
- Simple: 2.3ms
- Esco: 2.4ms
- Glider: 3.7ms
- Crux: 3.8ms
- DarkRoom: 3.9ms
- ClearlooksClassic: 4.3ms
- Glossy: 4.5ms
- Clearlooks: 4.6ms
- Inverted: 4.6ms
- Human: 6.0ms
So Ubuntu’s default theme is also the slowest of all the common themes?
Yes, interestingly. I think it’s because it involves printing text several times over, and text is an inherently expensive operation. This is somewhere SVG would really score, because of how it allows text to be styled with effects like “outline” and “shadow”.