GtkTreeView very slow for large lists

[John Lindgren <john lindgren aol com>]

Hi,

I am the lead developer of Audacious (a GTK+ based music player). 
Lately I have been trying to improve the performance with large
playlists (i.e. on the order of 100,000 entries).  The one remaining
problem spot seems to be GtkTreeView.  I am attaching a simple test
program that creates a GtkTreeView with 3 columns and 100,000 rows. 
With GTK+ 3.2.2, the program uses 29 seconds of CPU time before reaching
idle, on a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo.  (GTK+ 2.24.8 is considerably better, at 10
seconds, but still too slow for practical use.)  Is there any way that
GtkTreeView can be made usable for such long lists?

-- John Lindgren