Gtk+ / DirectFb / Pango performance

["Clif Swiggett" <Clif synapse com>]

Hi All  -
I'm hoping I can get some guidance here.

I'm cross compiling Gtk+ (latest CVS) to an ARM9 board.
DirectFB performance is great - I can fill the screen with text using
DirectFB font rendering and it appears instantaneous to a user.

However, Gtk / pango font rendering is incredibly slow.  If I show a Gtk
Window with a handful of labels, the text dribbles onto the screen.

The bulk of the time is spent in pango_renderer_draw_layout_line (the
first call is very slow - subsequent calls are much faster) and
pango_renderer_deactivate.  Since Gtk calls these every time it draws a
label, the performance overhead is crippling.

Does anyone have any recommendations for speeding this up?


- Clif