> -----Original Message----- > From: Owen Taylor [mailto:otaylor@xxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: 28 July 2005 20:22 > To: Robert Thorpe > Cc: gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: GTK+ 2 speed > > On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 18:22 +0100, Robert Thorpe wrote: > > Users of PCB are attempting to find out why the GTK+ > version gPCB is > > slower than the Athena version. I'm also beginning to write a > > graphical program and deciding which widget set to use, so I'm > > interested in the same issue. > > > > To help us both, it would be useful if anyone knowledgable on this > > list could answer a couple of questions: - > > > > * Are there any general reasons why GTK is slower than other widget > > libraries? Is it in fact slower, or is it just common > > mis-configurations? > > GTK+ is slower than Xaw because: > > - It displays things much more nicely > - It has good support for internationalization, accessibility, and > many other things that weren't on the radar when Xaw was designed. > - It has a much nicer programming interface > > It's a "you get what you pay for" situation, really. Toolkits > designed in the late 80's go really fast on today's hardware. > On the other hand, they don't do a whole lot. I understand that to some extent this is inevitable, though Windows does #1 and #2 of your list and still manages to be fast even on old hardware. (Windows XP of course doesn't but earlier versions do). If a program doesn't use the features you mention, like Pango and Unicode etc will the program go faster? > Our expectation and experience is that GTK+ performs decently > for even complex applications on hardware from the last 5 > years or so. If your app isn't performing OK, it's probably > because you are doing something in particular that is slow. I'm basing my experiences mostly on using Gnome on Xfree86, not on anything I've written myself. I haven't actually started writing the *nix GUI of the program I mentioned, I'm only planning it. Gnome doesn't work quickly on my two year old 1.6GHz Duron. Does anyone know if is Gnome well designed in this regard? > One possibility is text measurement ... text measurement is "free" > in the Xaw universe, so a lot of apps designed for that > repeatedly relayout and remeasure the same strings, or > measure a huge amount of text in a blocking operation. > Profiling may show where your app is having difficulties. That's a very useful thing to know. > > * Also, is it true that GTK must handle many events by > performing long > > string comparison operations? Does this cause a slowdown? > > String comparison is not a big expense in GTK+ operation. That's also useful to know. But, what I was asking was: Does event handling involve long string comparisons? Someone told me that is does and this causes problems in the specific case where you're creating a lot of events. Thanks for your time. _______________________________________________ gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
