slowness in getting events

[Efraim Yawitz <efraim yawitz gmail com>]

Hi,

I am trying to port a Windows application to Linux with GTK+ and an
important part of the GUI is a grid displaying a hex dump of memory which
must be constantly updated.

I am implementing this using a gtk_drawing_area, with a loop which calls
gdk_draw_layout() for each byte in the dump, for a total of 128 calls per
update.  I'm drawing to a pixmap, and then drawing the pixmap to the actual
window.  I realized that this might be a slow way to do things, but I was
surprised by the fact that the slowness that I'm seeing seems to be based on
the fact that the button and key events are not being received by my drawing
area right away.  I know this because I put a printf statement to write to
stdout every time my updating function is called, and this can happen a
number of times before the results of the event (a change in the selected
byte in the dump) register on the screen.

Any ideas why this is happening?

Thanks,

Ephraim Yawitz