RE: Fresh stuff for download: GLib 2.0.7, GTK+ 2.0. 9, Pango 1.0.5

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Tor Lillqvist wrote:

> [email protected] writes:
> "Yes this looks SUPERB, and the installer is good too, however, I am
> testing all my software on a P3 333mzh with 256 mb of RAM to make
> sure that it will run fine on low end machines, and this new GTK set
> of libs runs DAMN slow."

> And the earlier 2.0.x releases were speedier? Do you draw stuff with
> tiled or stippled fill styles? (Hmm, or does the tree widgets do
> that?) That's one thing that could well cause significant slowdown, as
> these were implemented only partially before, and now are implemented
> more completely (but slowly, at least on Win9x). Does your application
> look the same as earlier, or do you now notice things drawn
> differently, more correctly?

Tor, I haven't tested this in a rigorous manner, but I have the strong
impression that there must be some unintended side-effect slowing down
the latest gtk-2.0 win32 code relative to your September release; it's
not just to do with tiles and stipples (unless these are somehow much
more ubiquitous than I think).

When I fired up my gtk app on win32 with the new libs it was
immediately apparent that something was wrong.  Very simple things
like making a menu appear when the title is clicked had become
"gummy", with a noticeable lag.  One common thing in my app is opening
a gtktreeview with maybe a couple of dozen entries.  With the
September gtk-2.0 this was, to the eye, instantaneous; with the new
libs there's a noticeable delay.  Another example is opening a plain
text file (no formatting code) of around 45Kbytes in a gtktextview.
With the old libs, this worked with only a very slight delay; with the
new libs, it's like opening a distant web page in a browser, with the
vertical scroll bar slowly "wriggling", over the course of a few
seconds, towards its final size.

I don't want to seem ungrateful and it may be that I'm doing something
wrong, but right now it looks to me as if there's a fairly serious
problem with the new release.

In my case I am finding the new win32 libs slow relative to both (a)
gtk+-2.0.9 on Linux and (b) gtk+-2.0.6 on win98, in all cases with
comparable hardware (not cutting edge but not more than 2 years old).

Allin Cottrell.