GTK+ performance problems in etch
I have slight performance problems in GTK+ applications (whether run in GNOME
or not) in Debian etch. The widgets are drawn with a slight delay, so for
example when I switch between tabs in a preferences window, the old tab is
still shown for a moment before it is replaced by the new one. Or when I
close a window, revealing the one beneath it, a white rectangle appears for a
brief period until the picture is drawn.
Now, this is not disastrous, but I still find it annoying, to the point that I
cannot use GNOME anymore. My machine is already somewhat old: Celeron @ 900
MHz, 512M of PC100 SDRAM, NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS with 64M of memory (with the
native nvidia-legacy drivers). But on the same system, Qt/KDE3 performs
noticeably better.
In Debian sarge with GTK+ 2.6 there was no such problem, even with the vesa
driver for X, so I suspect that the performance penalty might be caused by
Cairo. In Gentoo, with everything compiled from source with
`-march=i686 -O2`, there are no significant problems either.
This behaviour does not depend on whether I use "Clearlooks" as my GTK+ theme,
or something more modest (e. g. "Mist").
People on #gtk+ @ irc.gnome.org told me that this seemed like an X server
configuration issue to them, but I am hesitant to believe this as I do not
see where the problem could be. The X config is rather standard, no new bells
and whistles like Xgl/Compiz/whatever.
So, any hints as to how I can improve the performance of GTK+ would be highly
appreciated... Preferably without rebuilding anything from source.
--Vasiliy Faronov
Reply to: