Re: Why gtk+ application are so slow

[Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 18:50 +0300, Victor Nazarov wrote:
> I have only ps/2 keyboard and usb mouse. Machine is Pentium III 
> Copermine 533 MHz with 384 MB RAM runing Linux kernel v 2.4.26...

Try the latest release candidate for the linux 2.6.10 kernel.  I think
you'll find the 2.6 kernel gives some pretty good speedups for GUI
applications, especially on an older processor such as your PIII.
Another thing is disk i/o.  Linux uses shared libraries heavily, and
disk performance can really impact load speed (which is not the same as
application response time which is already excellent in GTK).


> I havn't said that GObject signal marshalling is a major bottleneck. 
> I've said about overal run-time design of gtk...
> I have the following manual mesurments, wich are very inaccurate...
> It's near 3 seconds betwean clicking on gnome-terminal launcher and the 
> appearance of the window...
> It's near 5 second to start mozilla-thunderbird...
> Easy-tag (gtk1.2 application) starts very quickly --- not noticable...

Mozilla's apps take at least that long to start on windows as they do on
linux, especially on a 533 mHz machine.  

As for gnome-terminal, I find it pops up in under a second on my
machine.  In the end, it's not the speed of app loading that I really
care about; it's the perceived response and feel of the application once
loaded.  In this regard, GTK has no problems and is much improved over
the old GTK 1 days.

> 
> What can I do to improve it?

I have found that Fedora Core 3 (the combination of 2.6 kernel and
aggressive prelinking) just feels and acts snappy kind of how you
describe Windows acting.  I'd say the majority of the problem that
windows converts have complained about isn't loading time or even real
speed but rather perceived speed -- flicker, redraws, etc.  In this
area, things are getting much better.  New X11 extensions like XDAMAGE
and work to synchronize widget redraws to eliminate resize lag all help
make GTK look and feel as fast as Windows (even if the real numbers
indicated it was fast all along).

So I'd recommend the newer kernel and play around with prelinking (no
idea how you'd do it on debian).  And as the X.org stuff stabilizes,
that will definitely help things.

> 
> --
> vir
> 
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-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>