Re: [Gimp-developer] Ways to improve Gimp 2.9 performance

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2013-02-28 at 14:51 -0500, Elle Stone wrote:
> On 2/28/13, Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net> wrote:

> I switched to the nonfree nvidia distributed by openSUSE because the
> nonfree driver manages the fan better. Do you think the openSUSE
> version might be properly patched?

Yes, that's fine, just avoid downloading the drivers from Nvidia's Web
site.

> > so I have 2,500 fonts installed right now (and many more that are not
> > installed).
> That's a lot of fonts!

There are about as many again in my Adobe Font Folio folder.

Quark Express used to have the notion of a "project folder", and if you
put fonts in it, they'd be activated only when working on the files in
that folder. I miss this, but gimp is scatterbrained when it comes to
folders, with export going to the last place where you saved something
two days ago for an unrelated project unless you are careful.

[...]
> I need 16-bit precision for working with linear gamma files. I'm
> already switching back and forth between grayscale and RGB as needed,
> but I wasn't sure if it made much difference. I also wasn't sure if
> 16f vs 32f made any difference as gegl processes at double? precision
> 32f.

OK, for 2.9 I have not measured.

[...]

> > For more detail, say which operations exactly are unbearably slow....
>
> I do a lot of painting with large and small brushes on layer masks.
> That brush just crawls across the screen, makes real-time painting
> impossible. I think I will try working on scaled-down files until the
> masks are right, then scale up to the original size and drag the masks
> over to the full-sized image file.

Years ago there were programs that could automate this workflow.

Turning off 3D effects / compiz can increase drawing speed, and so can
clearing the undo history often (that might be changed in 2.9 though).

I'm still using 2.7/2.8 because of some filters that I used a lot not
being ported (and I'm too busy to think about porting them, sigh), e.g.
"sharpen".

> Regarding how to make optimal use of the available hard drives, there
> was a time when working on one drive, with swap files on another
> drive, etc really did make a big difference for image editing
> applications.

It still does, but if you have enough memory GIMP won't be accessing the
disk while you work, and it won't make as much difference apart from
startup and image loading times.

> And do you have any idea what large file(s) might Gimp have been
> writing to its system configuration file that filled up 15GB? The undo
> history?
Yes, the tile cache and undo history. And if it was that big, your gimp
would *really* have had a limp.

My guess is that post-gegl gimp will need much more memory, and this has
been my experience so far.

I have just ordered a desktop computer with 32G of ram... next will be
to try and get xsane to speak 16 bits per channel (the widest my scanner
offers) to gimp without requiring an intermediate file.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml