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

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 14:35 -0800, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:

> 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

Personally, that sounds a lot more like an application bug.  Perhaps you
should be notifying the Galeon/Abiword/whoever developers.  Especially
since you note this problem doesn't occur on GEdit.  The fact that
Abiword/Galeon are "more complex" should have *no* effect on the window
creation speed at all; the exact same GTK+ code is used for both
application.

When the apps create the window, they should populate it with widgets
and then set it as visible, not vice versa.

On another note, this should probably be taken to gtk-devel-list or
something.

> 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).

Very true.  I recall a lot of discussion on the panel and Nautilus for
providing instant visual feedback on actions that might take a bit more
than a split second, which makes it feel instant even when it isn't.

> 
> 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

Owen mentioned Pango updates in the referenced bug report, dunno if
those are in yet or not.  If you're using AA fonts without good Render
support, it can bring things to a crawl very easily.

Perhaps try disabling AA fonts just to see if it makes the window
creation speed noticably faster; might help narrow down the search for
the problem a tad.

You also haven't mentioned which theme you're using.  Things like
WackyClownTheme (or whatever) can kill GTK+ performance.

> 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.

Heh.  Oddly, I find KDE/Qt slower on every machine I've tried, and GNOME
quite responsive, even on my old 700MHZ Duron laptop and 400MHZ PII
workstation at work.  As already mentioned, your specific video driver
or applications could easily be the culprit of the problems.

> 
> Rgds,
> Eugenia

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.