Phoronix: Compton Compositing Window Manager Slows Down
The development pace of Compton, a lightweight compositing window manager for X11, has slowed down...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI4NTI
He ought to write it in Xcb instead of Xlib.
Speaking of lightweight compositors, cairo-compmgr has much better performance and also supports a lot of effects (via plugins) like transparency, animations, window expo, etc. which actually work well in pure software rendering. Here's a quick demo in Unity 2D (all compositing done by cairo-compmgr, not metacity): http://youtu.be/pmvehTl_PYo
I also maintain a PPA with it: https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel/+archive/cairo-compmgr
You could also use unagi:
http://unagi.mini-dweeb.org/
It is written in XCB...
I switched from Xfwm’s compositor to Compton two days ago and I’m very happy with it.
For what it’s worth here are the parameters I’m using:
compton -c -f -o 1.0 -I 0.1 -O 0.1 -C -i 0.95 -z --vsync opengl --unredir-if-possible --shadow-exclude "! name~=''" -b
I gained a very nice fade in/fade out effect, and of course no more tearing in VLC.