When xscreensaver kicks in, my machine gets slow. Is there a way to tell it to not run graphics demos?
You can still blank and/or lock your screen, while denying yourself the pleasure of graphical screen savers, by running xscreensaver-demo and selecting “Blank Screen Only” from the “Mode” option menu. But is that really necessary? Let’s address the real problem: when xscreensaver is blanking the screen, it runs its graphics demos at a low priority, so they should not be stealing cycles from other processes at all — they should be running only when no other process wants to run. This should result in your load average on an idle machine hovering just slightly above 1.0. The exception to this is the GL (3D) demos, when running on machines without 3D hardware. If you don’t have hardware-accelerated GL support on your machine, then the GL demos will be serious pigs. (Running them at a low priority doesn’t help, for a couple of not-very-good reasons.) So, a less drastic fix, in that situation, is to not run the GL demos: un-check any of the 3D hacks, and you can still run the non-resource-
Related Questions
- The manual says that xscreensaver will stop running graphics demos when my monitor goes into power-saving mode, but it doesn . Why?
- When xscreensaver kicks in, my machine gets slow. Is there a way to tell it to not run graphics demos?
- Why is my machine so slow when I run the monochrome and NeXTdimension displays?
