Komodo performance issue

> How remote is the remote display for your linux machine?  Are you 
> running Komodo over a wide area network?  That can really impeded 
> performance for apps that use pango for AA text rendering like Komodo. 
> The Tcl script in comparison is only passing around text and using the 
> most rudimentary Xlib calls.

Hi Jeff,

It's a local area network with 1Gbit ethernet.  We use a farm of Linux 
servers spanning various RedHat releases from 3.x to 5.x. 

I don't know about Anti-Aliased text rendering performance issues over 
Xlib.  I know that I have been using X-based apps in the same way for the 
past 13 years, most of which were written using Tcl/Tk front-ends.  We're 
doing VLSI design here, and almost every VLSI design tool has adopted 
Tcl/Tk for both the front end GUI and the scripting language.  But even 13 
years ago the Modelsim simulator ran perfectly fine on Xlib with far 
slower processors on the server (Sun Sparc5)  and desktop client 
(Pentium-Pro 100MHz).  I have always used Hummingbird Exceed as the client 
X-Server on Windows.  So it is definitely strange to find an application 
that runs so slowly.

My tkcon test was using Tcl 8.4 in both cases (slightly different 
patchlevels - 8.4.13 on Linux, 8.4.16 on Windows).  I was really just 
trying to get a baseline for relative performance comparison between the 
two machines, knowing that tkcon would be fairly lightweight otherwise. 
But I got a paradoxical result where the slower CPU completed the task 
twice as fast. 

It sounds like you suspect the performance problem with Komodo is related 
to the use of Pango for AA text rendering.  Is there any way to disable 
that in order to test your theory?  Any other ideas?

I really like the Komodo environment, but the performance is so poor on 
the Linux machines that it is nearly unusable.  And because I'm doing VLSI 
design work, I really need to run it on the Linux server as that is where 
the bulk of the code exists.

-Tom
ForwardSourceID:NT000620AA

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