Comment 15 for bug 683635

Travis: the stuff that's trying to be toned down/eliminated here is all the stuff that creates a perception of lag or delay in the Alt-tab process and which prevents interactions feeling clickity-click snappy. Based on the last two comments here (#13 and #14), I've tried two things:

  a. CCSM->"Fade"; switching to "Constant Time" (vs. Constant Speed) and seeing Speed to minimum (0.1, no known/documented units). This makes the experience a bit more pleasant but seems to have a bug (I was no longer able to alt-tab back to the CCSM window, like a game of whack-a-mole, other unfocused windows kept being raised instead)
  b. CCSM->"Switcher"; setting opacity to 100%; this means windows are no longer "disappeared". All are shown on the screen during the alt-tab process and just the stack order is changed... this is probably closer to what people are used to, and since everything is already completely opaque (except terminals) there is no appreciable fading.

Both help, but both feel like workarounds.

Didier: I've just noticed the setting just below those "Build Mipmaps for smooth scaling"... I bet this is the root-cause; doing that successful scaling (times N windows onscreen) would account for the massive blip in RAM usage that causes the deadlock/disk I/O death in extreme cases, and in normal cases is just causing the multi-second lag).