[gentoo-user] Anyone using xfce4 with compositing turned off?

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

I'm seeing horrible performance from the xfce window manager (xfwm4) on
my main, everyday machine, but not on an older backup machine or on any
of the linux virtual machines I run on virtualbox.

The symptoms:  moving a window with the mouse is so slow as to be
painful, and the CPU usage (on one of four CPUs) jumps to 100% almost
immediately (xfwm4 is the culprit, see below).

If I open an xterm and run (for example) "/usr/bin/marco --replace",
this sluggish behavior returns to normal immediately.

After wasting hours on google I finally noticed that I had compiled
x11-wm/xfwm4 with the xcomposite useflag disabled, so I enabled it and
re-emerged xfwm4.

Now I can get decent performance from xfwm4, but only if first I turn on
compositing by running xfwm4-tweaks-settings.  (No, not by running the
puny and feeble xfwm4-settings app:  I need to invoke a "tweak" to make
xfce4 an acceptable Desktop Environment on my main desktop machine.

<official rant mode>
I remember going through this same frustration with gnome3, which was
(and is) unusable without installing the gnome-tweak-tool package and
using it to customize settings that I still don't understand.

(That's why I finally gave up on gnome3, and I may yet give up on xfce4
and go back to mate.)

Note that I'm not turning off <official rant mode> yet, but I should
mention that this machine is ~amd64 with ati-drivers-15.7 and vanilla
kernel 3.14.51.  (Same problem with gentoo-sources-3.18.19, BTW.)