Performance Issue GTK 2.8 on 64bit Suse 10

[Dave Richards <drichard largo com>]

All-

    I wanted to bring something to your attention, but unfortunately very shortly I won't be able to spend more time doing additional testing on this issue.

   We built a new 64 bit, Quad Xeon 3.66Ghz server and installed 64bit Suse 10.  The only application we were testing on that server is Evolution.  On our RISC based thin clients we found it to be slower by about a factor of 5-6 over our current release of Evolution.  What we are seeing that is slow is repaints and rendering of screen changes.  If you click from one folder to another, it takes about 5-6 seconds to update the UI.  The pulldowns are sluggish and, and moving between the various Calendar/Mail/Task/Contact views takes many seconds. 

   The Xserver on these thin clients are missing RENDER and some of the newer extensions.  We have fiber running to the closets and 100Mb to the desktops.  Plenty of network and other applications run fine.

   At first we thought it was related to GTK 2.8/Cairo and all of the most recent changes.  However, we built a 32bit machine and put down Suse 10 and tried it there and it's running just fine.

   I feel that it's only a 64bit issue.  Some of the IRC channel suggest it might be compiler issues, and that's very possible.  

   I wanted to bring it to the groups attention.  We probably are going to downgrade that machine to the 32bit version of Suse :( and put that code into production.   This is our first and only 64bit machine, so I won't be able to recreate these conditions again until the next one comes in.

Regards
Dave Richards
City of Largo, Florida