Making Gnome Panel Autohide Faster

i have always been thinking that gnome is slow. latest example i could quote was the miserable speed in which the panel hides and unhides (if autohide is enabled)

however we can tweak the autohide delay and many other gnome related settings in gconf-editor

path to edit settings of top panel:
/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0

path to edit settings of bottom panel:
/apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0

here you can change the values of hide_delay and unhide_delay as per your needs.

however, in my case even reducing the delay value to zero didn't speed up the process. that was because my graphics card is slow, and it takes up time in animating the hide and unhide process.

to get rid of panel animation, uncheck enable_animations field.

after doing this, my panels became really snappy.