Populating the MATE menu icons

[upnort]

The very first instance of opening the MATE menu is always painfully slow. I have noticed this behavior in other distros as well. After the menu has a chance to populate all of the icons, the menu is snappy for the remainder of the session.

My understanding is the menu should be using each icon theme's cache. Perhaps that is indeed the case, but using the cache does not seem to happen until that very first menu instance. Seems the default in MATE is not to populate the menu icons until accessing the menu.

Can others confirm this behavior?

Does anybody have any insight into this behavior or how to correct or work around?

Thanks.

BTW, yes I have the following in the user's gtkrc-2.0:

gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0
gtk-menu-popdown-delay = 0
gtk-menu-bar-popup-delay = 0

[antikythera]

I've noticed similar after installing LibreOffice. It takes a few seconds to generate the cache and draw the icons in the Office category.

I use mintmenu on MATE but the behaviour is the same. It is not something that concerns me too much. I too have those GTK tweaks in place..

[upnort]

This is curious. I tested the Fedora Mate live spin. No delay. The spin uses the Applications-Places-System menu. I use the main mate menu.

Your statement about LO rings a bell. I recall a discussion or two about LO icons.

[upnort]

The problem seems to be related to the Main Menu. When I add the Menu Bar (Applications-Places-System) menu and reboot, both menus respond snappily. Remove the Applications-Places-System menu and the Main Menu is alway slow to open and populate icons.

There is a relationship with LIbreOffice. I removed the LO suite and rebooted. While the Main Menu still did not open for about 3 seconds upon the first instance, the icons populated much faster than with LO installed.

Oddly, replacing the Main Menu with the Menu Bar did not resolve the delay when opening the menu for the first time.

As I use a single panel, the Applications-Places-System (Menu Bar) menu is not a preferred option because of the space used in the panel.

Often when I tested with the Menu Bar, I had X artifacts in the upper left corner of the desktop. I never saw that before anywhere except in Fedora.

[upnort]

Does anybody have ideas to resolve this opening delay?

I observe a delay on every OS I use MATE: Fedora, CentOS, LMDE, and Slackware. The initial delay is significant, up to 6 or 7 seconds. After each sub menu has populated then the menu and all sub menus respond nicely.

This one bug is pushing me to abandoning MATE.

[antikythera]

After experimenting this evening, I have managed to only recreate it on the specific sub-menus LibreOffice has icons in when it is installed.

So there is a possible issue there. Whether the office suite or it's dependencies (gnome-vfs2 and gnome-vfs2-common) I am not able to tell.

I believe I can attribute the behaviour to LibreOffice or those dependencies because I have a custom ISO without LibreOffice. All the sub-menus open fine every time until it is installed.

[upnort]

Thanks.

I agree the LO icons play a role.

This afternoon I tested Fedora 22 with a fresh user account in order to receive all default settings. While the user account was fresh the system remained the same as I have been using for months. There could be variables other than LO that plays a role. I would have to install a fresh system as well and methodically install apps and make configuration changes to see how the menu responds outside of my many customizations.

That all said, the menu bar (Applications/Places/System) always responds immediately.

As I hinted in the other thread, when I add the Mate (simple) menu to the panel and keep the menu bar, the simple menu responds quickly.

When I remove the menu bar the simple menu misbehaves and I see delays with opening.

I repeated the tests several times and rebooted each time to ensure nothing was cached in RAM.

So yes, LO plays a role but something else is awry too.