Re: Multi-threaded gtk app very very slow

["Daniel Haude" <dunno stoptrick com>]

On Mon, 17 Jul 2006 20:10:05 +0200, Mark Richardson <markmapo yahoo com>  
wrote:

> I have a multi-threaded application that I developed using gtk 2.4.1

I'm writing one of those myself, and funny things can happen. One  
important rule to remember is this:

Run all your GUI stuff in one thread only. Communication with other  
threads can be accomplished through idle functions.

At one time my app was behaving very badly. It segfaulted all the time,  
and gdb stack traces showed nothing but gtk/glib core functions. Later it  
turned out that some function in the non-GUI thread was stomping all over  
memory that had been free()d prematurely (and then, presumably,  been  
given to the GUI thread via malloc()). From the debugger output it looked  
as if all was gtk's fault.

Moral: Beware. This is of course not a gtk-specific problem, but since gtk  
seems to allocate lots of bits of memory frequently, it will easily trip  
over memory corruption. This is, of course, not limited to multi-threaded  
programs, but those are a lot harder to debug.

robert