RE: GTK+ 2 speed

[Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 16:07 +0100, Robert Thorpe wrote:
> > "GNOME doesn't work quickly" is a fairly broad statement. To 
> > really comment on that, I'd have to know more specifically 
> > what was slow for you.
> 
> To be specific, redrawing is slow.  Moving from a terminal to X with
> Alt-Ctrl-F7 it takes a couple of seconds for all the widgets to redraw
> themselves.

This is a very interesting observation.  It illustrates greatly the
principle of perceived speed vs real speed.  In this case the perceived
speed is bad, but the real speed is actually quite acceptable.  For
example, under windows XP if all windows were forced to redraw
simultaneously, I've seen this exact same thing.  As we transition X11
to the new OpenGL-backed technology, we won't see this problem you
describe anymore.  A switch from text to graphics console and everything
will be restored fairly instantly because each window has its own OpenGL
backing store offscreen that is instantly composited onto the screen by
the high-speed video card operations.  In this case, everything,
including GTK seems an order of magnitude faster, when in fact GTK is
the same speed as it was before.

Thus for your application's speed criteria, this example you mentioned
of gnome's slowness is not valid.  That said, perceived speed is very
important to the end user and I think GTK does a pretty good job.
Certainly I've not noticed any lag under normal circumstances for
several years now.  I'm using very complicated gnome apps including
evolution, gimp, gaim, galeon, and inkscape.

> > If people run your PCB application on 64 megabyte 200Mhz 
> > machines - then I'd worry about GTK+ performance first. If 
> > people are using it on reasonably modern machines, I'd worry 
> > first that your users are currently being subjected to Xaw.
> 
> I think I've confused you, there are two programs here: The one I'm
> working on, which has no X interface yet and has nothing to do with
> printed circuits.  Then there is PCB, a program written for pcb design
> by lots of other people who aren't me.

In any event, I find gtk2 apps to run very well even on 64 MB, 200 MHz
machines.  Just don't expect a heavy desktop to be acceptable.  XFCe is
light enough that even complicated gtk2 apps run quite well.


Michael

> 
> I was asking this question because it's of interest to me and
> users/developers of PCB whom I'm going to pass my findings to.
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-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>