Gnome / GTK Menus Slow in Dual Head With Compiz
Another useless tip from the guy that brought you the animated edj icon for emacs.
Being a coder of perl and php I use a dual head setup in both windows and linux. Rather than using TwinView I like to use 2 seperate xscreens. This config is much more suited to my requirements. Especially when you take the compiz desktop cube into consideration (8 desktops to work on :)!!! One thing I did notice was that the menu on Xscreen 1 where woefully slow, somtimes taking 3 seconds to appear, not very good for productivity (kinda wastes the 8 desktops when you spend an hour a day waiting for menus)! Something had to be done...
I already took control of the Gnome start up scripts (another story altogether) by removing everything from the Menu -> System -> Preferences -> Session applet by removing everything and putting it all in one script so I control what starts when! After using fusion-icon to configure compiz the way I want I removed that from the script and manually started compiz on each display, as opposed to having one copy of compiz running for both displays. It seemed to cure the problem so I added it into my ~/bin/gnome-start script specifying the display to which each copy of compiz should attach using the command line options fusion-icon (ps auxf) was passing through along with some extras.
DISPLAY=:0.0 compiz.real --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints --only-current-screen ccp --display :0.0 &
DISPLAY=:0.0 emerald --replace &
sleep 3
DISPLAY=:0.1 compiz.real --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints --only-current-screen ccp --display :0.1 &
DISPLAY=:0.1 emerald --replace &
I added a brief sleep in there because it all seemed to get a bit confusing for the system starting 2 copys of the same app at the same time..
All my problems are now solved :) my menus fly open in a fraction of a second in all the random animated glory compiz can throw...