menu is so slow to display

[anderigs]

I LOVE cinnamon. BUT (and there is always a BUT) the only thing that annoys me is that the menu takes about 3 seconds to display - ok I am only using an atom netbook but still this seems overlong. is there anyway to speed this up? I have a feeling that each time I press menu it is working out what to display. I have various workarounds in place (like the great favourites applet) but would prefer to have an instant menu.
Any ideas?
Cheers
andE

[DrHu]

Well, you could change the menu settings, delays or selection timers (keyboards, mouseclicks..) for
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=86813

[mbokil]

You could create your own little mini menu using this applet. It will be much faster since it only displays one list. Just put all your favorite stuff on one list. To make the regular menu go faster turn off all the desktop effects. There is not a lot more you can do to make it faster since it has a lot of javascript processing the lists in the menu which can be slow. I would use other applets.

http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/60

You could also try classicmenu-indicator. It is written in Python and is very fast. Get it here: http://www.florian-diesch.de/software/c ... indicator/

-mark

[anderigs]

Hi,
thanks! the classic menu indicator is an almost perfect solution. Would be great though if the normal menu would be faster as it does look prettier
but until such time will live with this.
Cheers,
andE

[mbokil]

I've been thinking about forking classic menu into a native cinnamon applet. I have an applet I am working on now but when I am done I will look into it. One idea would be to have Cinnamon build an XML file of the menu on startup and save it somewhere. Then when the user clicks the menu button it would display the XML file. This would probably improve performance since it would prevent javascript from having to assemble the menu each time. In general gnome shell could benefit from some sort of caching system that compiles applets/extensions. This doesn't exist yet to my knowledge. A good example of this strategy is the Firefox browser. Extensions are cached first time they are run improving performance. In some ways Mozilla was way ahead of the times using Javascript and XML for apps. Most people are unaware that Firefox's GUI is a large collection of simple XML and Javascript files. They had performance issues early on but were able to fix it using caching and improving their Javascript engine.