[Glade-users] Glade performance unbearably slow

[tristan.van.berkom at gmail.com (Tristan Van Berkom)]

Are you by chance editing a glade file with a rediculously large
GtkTable/GtkGrid ?

Like 100 columns X 100 rows or larger ?

There is a patch in the pipeline to fix that (already applied for
GtkTable, needs to
be ported to GtkGrid), in any case, clearly people should not use huge
tables and grids in GTK+ applications, they should use treeviews
instead to display
huge data sets.

That said, I expect that patch will speed up the regular recursive GtkGrid case
significantly.

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 3:47 AM, Matej Nanut <matejnanut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone, I'd really like to use Glade but on my machine and system,
> it runs unbearably slow. Anything I click takes several seconds (and it
> seems like the same interval) every time. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Please define what you mean by "anything I click", I can't believe that.

Can you please try Glade on a new project and measure/try the following:

  - Time to create the first GtkWindow
  - Time to create the first GtkWindow's child GtkBox or GtkGrid

These 2 steps should be 'slightly' slower than

  - Time to select the toplevel GtkWindow (and update properties in the editor)
  - Time to select the GtkWindow child

The first time selecting/creating a widget of any object class is slower
because after creating an editor for a given class we cache the editors
in order to display them quicker.

Then, try:
  - Loading a separate project
  - Switch tabs from project to project

Changing projects should be a lot snappier since last year, it used
to take much much time to recurse over the catalog and set widget types
in the palette sensitive/insensitive based on the loaded project target
version, now instead we cache a palette for every project.

Then try for instance:
  - Clicking the "File" menu

Does it take a lot of time to display the file menu after being clicked ?

Glade does nothing at this time, if this operation takes too much time
in itself it means that GTK+ and/or the theme engine it is using is
too slow for your system.

For what it's worth, the bottlenecks in Glade are really:
  - Time to load a project (at least now we have progress bar feedback)
  - Time to select a widget (because of the time required to display the
    widget in the editor)
  - Time to set a property (when changing label text for instance, is
    it very slow when typing in the property editor entry ?)
  - Time to switch the active project (this should take virtually no time
    by now actually but used to be a bottle neck).

> My Glade version as reported by the package manager is 3.10.2, my gtk3
> version 3.2.2.
>
> I don't know if it's relevant, but on startup glade reports:
> ? GladeUI-Message: No displayable values for property
> GtkMessageDialog::message-type
> ? GladeUI-Message: No displayable values for property GtkTreeSelection::mode
> ? GladeUI-Message: 14 missing displayable value for
> GtkCellRendererAccel::accel-mods

These are of no consequence, they only mean that you are missing
some strings which could be more nicely displayed (and translatable)
for enumeration/flags type values.

Whenever GTK+ adds enum/flag properties, Glade needs to mark them internally
for translation since GTK+ does not provide translations for
enumeration/flag value
constant names.

So, please let us know, how fast is your processor ? are you running Glade alone
or is firefox processing evil scripts for gmail sending your
information to spy agencies ?
consequently also slowing down your machine ?

How much ram to you have... is Glade causing your machine to 'swap' memory ?

And of course... which operations exactly are slow ?

Thanks,
     -Tristan