27

I think that the window manager should give visual cues as to which process is loading the cpu / a cpu core the most.

Nowadays, with multicore systems, one may not notice if there's a firefox instance with flash hogging one cpu, but on a laptop running on batteries this may have a nasty impact.

So the idea I had is that the window manager should give visual cues as to what the processes behind a specific window 'cost' in terms of cpu power.

For example, the window border which now can have just a shadow, could instead get a glow that goes from green or some neutral tint/shade (low cpu load) to orange or brighter (medium load) to red/brightest (high load) and perhaps even starts pulsating if it's really taking up a cpu core completely. The titlebar could also change colour or so, etc.

I first proposed this here: viewtopic.php?f=111&t=82347 where I got the hint to put it up here at brainstorm.

It seems that it may be possible with some restrictions, depending on whether certain features of X are respected.

You know... this is actually a really good idea. Krunner could report how much CPU a window in the, "Programs only" and KWin could simply find the program's process/window(s) and make it glow a bit. I imagine it being colour-coded as well: red would be, "Woah woah woah, it's using the whole damn thing" and blue would be something in the 30% - 60% bandwidth.

I agree with the idea of visual feedback, but not with a glow. I think my pref would be to indicate in the task bar or maybe just the a little light in the top window decoration sitting up near the min/max/close buttons.

I think a glow would be pretty

Still, if a more universal plugin was made for this there would be no reason not to have both...

I think the main part of the idea / request is that there should be visual feedback, and I think a glow could be nice; I agree that it could just be some pixels in the top window decoration or so.

That does assume there is a window decoration, which may not be the case. Which is why I thought of a glow around/behind the window.

Indicating in the taskbar is not going to help if the taskbar is set to auto hide - it's very annoying if it would pop up for a legitimate process that takes lots of cpu cycles.

And then there are those who set their taskbar to only show windows of the current desktop - which means that a window on a different desktop would not get noticed. I realise that this situation is not handled better with the original 'glowing' window decoration...

But let's focus on the idea of getting visual feedback, and with several options on how exactly to give this feedback (via some kind of plugin).

I would suggest to add this feature to shadow plugin on KWin. Then it would work on all decoration styles what there is.

Then add samekind feature for taskpanel what would show a live progress bar (nice small, 2px widht) on it.

Bad thing is that on my system tha plasma usually takes the most of CPU, so it does not show up. And more we add to plasma things, more it eats battery

The possibility to animate icons (on)/taskpanel would be nice.