Comment 36 for bug 299330

The original bug report mentions a latency of 0.5 seconds, so note that this is NOT a hugely obvious bug - nevertheless it is one of the most important things to be responsive on the entire desktop. UI responsiveness is usually measured in milliseconds, a full second is an eternity for a keystroke response.

I too see this bug in Ubuntu 10.10 using an Nvidia 240 GT (driver version 260.19.06), with metacity compositing enabled. Latency is near-zero when compositing is disabled. Latency encountered when using Compiz should probably not be discussed in this bug report; compiz is a totally separate code path with unique issues.

Naive observation suggests that the WM is waiting for the window thumbnails to render before it draws the alt-tab window for the first time. It's vastly preferable for the alt-tab window to appear immediately, with whatever representation of the windows it can provide (icon + name) until the window thumbnail is ready to display. Aside from more complex code, are there any reasons this shouldn't be the intended behavior?