Comment 5 for bug 683635

We've dug into this a bit more, there are several things going on; the three we've specifically itemised so far; this are probably all down to the 'staticswitcher' Compiz applet, so this possibly wants moving there instead of Unity. Items:

  1. Fade-in vs. Fade-out speed as the two windows transition. The Fade-out speed is okay, but the Fade-in speed is too high (> 100 msec)
  2. The latency of the grey chaser rectangle is too laggy. This can be set using CCSM->Window Management->Static Applet Switcher->Behaviour->Speed (this value is inverse, higher is faster). Didrocks reckons that a value of 6.5-7.5 is an improvement and I agree, but there also appears to be some baseline overhead, possibly:
  3. The tabbing latency is dependant upon the complexity of the target backing pixmap. Eg. switching to a HUGE image in eog causes a delay of 2+ seconds. This is now filed as bug #684843.

For (1): the fade-in and fade-out could be made asymmetric: new window appears near instantaneously, old window fades out slowly. If the are completely overlaid the fade-out will be less apparent, but if they are in different areas of the screen it will still be noticeable.

For (2): the speed can be improved by setting a different default value for the moment

For (3): tracking on the other bug report but the resultant infinite swapping could be the root cause of the crashes I'm getting on a 1GB ThinkPad.