Gtk Performance changes from 2.6 -> 2.12

[John Rice <John Rice Sun COM>]

Hi,

Sean McGrath who works on Solaris performance ran some tests with 
GtkPerf and turned up the following results.

Any thoughts on why such a big regression (44%) in Gtk performance in 
Gnome 2.6 [bundled] and 2.12? Is it cairo or something else? GtkTextView 
- Scroll looks particulary hot at 130%.

JR

Sean
========================================
I grabbed the latest version from:
    http://gtkperf.sourceforge.net
(Brian Nitz contributed a bunch of work back to the latest version)

We've a small toshiba M100 laptop in our lab here, where I ran it with
snv_27a [OpenSolaris b27, with Gnome 2.6]

I then put gnome2.12 on the laptop and reran the benchmark.

Note: I ran gtkperf like:

a) start Xserver (Xorg for x86, Xsun for sparc)

 1) wait 5 secs

 2) start gtkperf via
     gtkperf -a -c 1000

 3) repeat from 1) 5 times

I don't have a gnome-session running - have little else running.
We run X11benchmark in this way as well.

Results:

 snv_27a w/ bundled gnome: 220.58 seconds
 snv_27a w/ gnome 2.12   : 319.10 seconds

 Thats a 45 % difference  :)

 Breaking it down into the different metrics, we can see whats taking its
 times.  Seems that scrolling has regressed the most with a 128 % 
difference.

 The only metric to improve was drawing Pixbufs..


Metric                    Bundled Gnome2.12 % diff
GtkEntry                   0.550   0.770    40.000
GtkComboBox               10.320  14.270    38.275
GtkComboBoxEntry           9.470  11.910    25.766
GtkSpinButton              1.020   1.630    59.804
GtkProgressBar             0.730   1.040    42.466
GtkToggleButton            3.270   4.210    28.746
GtkCheckButton             3.310   4.440    34.139
GtkRadioButton             3.050   5.450    78.689
GtkTextView - Add text    85.080 115.220    35.425
GtkTextView - Scroll      37.750  85.990   127.788
GtkDrawingArea - Lines    13.220  13.720     3.782
GtkDrawingArea - Circles  26.800  27.280     1.791
GtkDrawingArea - Text     20.990  28.160    34.159
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs   5.010   4.950    -1.198
--------------------------------------------------
Total Time               220.590 319.070    44.644