Comment 23 for bug 599425

Sorry for the lack of updates, we've been busy trying to implement the ideas mentioned above. The current status is:

- We've merged in the work to work around Clutter wanting to paint everything, every cycle, so there should be a big improvement in this week's release of Unity. The difference we get is a drop from 40-50% with Totem playing to 10-12% (expected, as we're actually rendering Totem's window too). We hope to make this even better with some more work on what paints every cycle. On idle, CPU usage should have now dropped down to 0-1% (depending on if the system is actually idle, no blinking cursors!)

- Our work on removing the use of glReadPixels from Clutter for Unity is mostly complete and will land in Maverick this week. This will make general performance when using Unity components much better

- Running with PowerTop, Unity is not suffering from excessive wakeups

- Finally, we hope to continue optimizing the netbook case of maximised windows (making sure things underneath aren't painting). Mutter already does some of this, but we hope to optimize further.