Re: GTK+ (Was: Evolution 2.0 and GNOME 2.6)

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

Because some people might wanna call me crazy over this, and I know I am
not, I asked my husband (graphics engineer) to have a look at the "speed"
issue for me and give me his insight. As I said on my previous email, it's a
"feeling of unresponsiveness", more than anything else.

So, after showing him on my screen (please note I don't have gnome
installation issues, I get the same feel of gtk on many machines with
different OSes and gfx drivers even) what I consider "slow" and
"unresponsive", he came to the conclusion that gtk's windows don't entirely
construct themselves as fast as QT's do (our comparison was testing a number
of different gnome and kde apps). It seems that the GTK way of displaying a
new window or menu is to first render on screen the background view and then
load on top of it its widgets. Other toolkits prefer to construct entirely
the window and then show it on screen, but that's not to say that gtk's way
is not good. It is just that I can visibly see the lag between the window
construction and the population of widgets for a tenth of a second and that
shouldn't happen IMHO. I think that's what gives me that *feeling* of
slowness and unresponsiveness (a good example is when loading the
/Preferences/File_Management panel or right clicking on kedit and gedit, I
can see the window coming up and then the widgets coming up a short while
after). These lag times are measured on the tenths of the second, granted,
but it is still visible and it just bothers me (even if under the hood gtk
might be faster than anything else out there, what matters sometimes to
plain users is the "impression" they get from the way things  are rendered
before their eyes).

Another thing that might be the culprit is some extra flickering that might
be going on or might be the font handling, I don't know. Or, I might be just
picky... but the overall impression on responsiveness gtk apps give me today
on the widget/window level are not as high as kde's or XP's and I would
sincerely like to see some improvements on this issue.

Rgds,
Eugenia


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Owen Taylor" <otaylor redhat com>
To: "Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>
Cc: "Bastien Nocera" <hadess hadess net>; <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2004 2:07 PM
Subject: Re: GTK+ (Was: Evolution 2.0 and GNOME 2.6)


> On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 13:04, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
>
> > I find GTK+ slower than Qt, yes, and also the overall "speed experience"
is
> > much worse than OSX's and XP's (especially the 2.x series). I have
talked
> > about this in the past but all we get from Owen in the bugzilla is "show
me
> > benchmarks" and "prove it with some code", which obviously doesn't help
> > normal users (non-programmers) to explain the slowness.
>
> I'm wondering how that could possibly be a fair summary of:
>
>  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113040
>
> which is the bug in bugzilla. Yes, we haven't had the opportunity
> yet to implement that optimization, but I don't even see any
> mention of benchmarks in that bug. (Other places I've certainly mention
> how important benchmarks are to doing performance work, but...)
>
> Regards,
> Owen
>
>
>