GtkTreeView unbearably slow

[Vikram Noel Ambrose <noel ambrose gmail com>]

Why is GtkTreeView so horrendously slow compared to... QTreeView for 
example?

Add compiz to the mix and GtkTreeView becomes embarrassing while 
QTreeView is unfaded. I've tried to google around and I found that 
people suggest disabling double buffering and/or writing a custom cell 
renderer that does not use pango.

Disabling double buffering *GTK_WIDGET_UNSET_FLAGS (widget, 
GTK_DOUBLE_BUFFERED);*  seems to have some effect without compiz (but 
still no way near as fast as QTreeView), but with compiz it doesn't seem 
to do anything.

I haven't tried writing a custom cell renderer yet as I don't know which 
elements of the renderer need to be customised for speed.

I'm using a GtkTreeView with about 5 columns, all small text strings. 
Using GtkTextCellRenderer. A couple thousand rows.

The docs say that setting "fixed-height-mode" speeds up treeview but it 
requires you to set GTK_TREE_VIEW_COLUMN_FIXED. What does column width 
have to do with fixed row heights?

Do any of you know how to speed up GtkTreeView? or why QTreeView is so 
much faster (and doesn't degrade in performance as the number of rows 
increases)?

I'm using Gtk-2.18.3 on Ubuntu 9.10

thanks,


Vik.