threads and performance issues

["Andy Schmidgall" <abschmi ilstu edu>]

I'm having some performance problems with my threaded GTK application. My
program needs to interact with another application. Unfortunately, the other
application has some issues. (it's a processor hog among other things)

It runs just fine when it runs by itself. The problem is when both programs
are run at the same time. My program works ok, except that some things like
window refresh/redraw are very choppy. This isn't a huge problem since the
program will be kept minimized the majority of the time...

I did some tests, and the gdk_threads_enter function seems to be causing(?)
this. I added it to a non-threaded simple test program just to test, and it
had the same problems.

I'm using GTK for windows, and I'm unable to test it on Linux at this point.
(the other program is windows only right now, but we're hoping to change
that in the future) So, I'm not sure if this is a windows-only thing or
what. Has anyone else noticed anything like this?

-Andy