RE: gtk application taking 6 seconds to load

["Vallone, Anthony" <anthony vallone lmco com>]

The project I am working on had the same problem after upgrading from
GTK+ 2.1 to 2.12 on Solaris 9.  Even a hello-world app was taking
several seconds to open.  So, I profiled hello-world and found that most
of the time was spent on font rendering.  Newer versions of GTK+ are now
using fontconfig and cairo for font rendering.  So, we deleted some of
the useless fonts and ran fc-cache to cache the fonts for fontconfig.
Our apps are starting up much faster now.

While we are on the performance subject, our apps are still a little
sluggish with screen updates since upgrading to 2.12. We could be wrong,
but we are guessing that switching to the new cairo has moved a lot of
processing from the cpu to the graphics card using XRender extensions.
Our project is stuck using old Solaris machines (Sunblade 2500) with old
graphics cards (XVR-1200), and the graphics card may not support the
render extensions.  

Does anybody know of any ways to tweak GTK+, X, Solaris, or the graphics
card to make our apps as fast as they were in GTK+ 2.1?  

Also, could anyone clarify our assumptions about GTK+ changes from 2.1
to 2.12 that could impact performance?

Thanks,
Anthony Vallone