Re: speeding up GtkTreeView?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 09:39:06AM +0100, Olaf Fr±czyk wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-02-15 at 01:48, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >  - you can avoid TreeStore/ListStore entirely and do your 
> >    own object providing a GtkTreeModel interface
> Is there some tutorial how to do it?
> >  - you can have a single-column TreeStore/ListStore where the 
> >    column contains a single void* pointing to a custom struct
> >    (gtk-demo has an example here I believe)
> >
> > GtkListStore is a linked list, and if you set a string on it for
> > example it's going to copy the string. So if you stuff copy 8 strings
> > per row into a giant linked list, it is not going to be fast.
> Could you explain the difference between storing data by GtkListStore
> and GtkCList?

There are several reasons why CList is different, among them:

 - it assumes fixed-height rows and columns (TreeView has a mode for
   this, though I'm not sure TreeView always takes advantage of it as
   much as it could).

 - it hardcodes the data structure to a linked list instead of making
   it pluggable, so it can iterate over it a good bit more quickly
   without function call or iterator overhead, but you can't write 
   a custom model.

 - CList doesn't have many of the features such as different kinds of 
   cell renderer.

> And a hint how to make GtkTree* being as fast as GTkCList.

You have to think about it a little bit, it depends on what you are
doing and why what you are doing is slow.

As I said two possible speedups if your slow code is stuffing lots of
data into ListStore: storing a custom struct in the ListStore, and
writing a custom model.

Not to say there aren't improvements possible to TreeView itself, but
also I think many people are doing things that are not efficient.

I would suggest profiling as a way to see what's going on.

Havoc