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

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Fri, 2013-03-22 at 16:34 -0400, Elle Stone wrote:

> I'd prefer that Gimp to monopolize both CPUs and get the job done
> twice as fast. Would a real-time kernel setup like the audio linux
> distributions use help? Is there a setting in Gimp that I missed? Or a
> compile-time switch in babl, gegl, or Gimp?

Nothing so easy - it would require that more of GIMP be written to be
multi-threaded at the C level. Gegl has experimental multithreading
support, though, and I think it's a configure option. Try configure
--help. Last I checked (over a year ago) it had problems, maybe it's
good now?

On freezing other applications...

There are places where GIMP seems to do a screen/pointer grab, and
there's a way to compile to disable those I think, which would probably
help other applications to "unfreeze". Example: between clicking with
"select by colour" tool and the time that the marching ants are drawn
can easily be over a minute for me, and the system is unuseable for much
of that time.

Speaking of that, slowing down the marching ants (in edit/prefs) can
help a LOT on large images, at least in 2.6 and earlier, I didn't try in
2.9

> Partha's optimized Windows build has inspired me to do a test Gentoo
> install on a laptop, with the hopes of learning enough about Gentoo
> and optimization to be able to install a properly optimized Gentoo on
> my main computer. It will be interesting to see if Gimp runs any
> faster on a fully optimized Linux distribution.

Compared to a 486-based distribution like older Debian systems, yes.

Compared to a more modern Pentium-based distribution, or on a 64-bit
system, probably much less so. At one point some people compared gentoo
and Mandriva linux systems, and found very small differences overall,
the biggest of which was down to the way the prelinker was run, so
Mandriva changed that to be more like Gentoo.

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