Re: corba/gnorba/bonobo documentation + misc question/ideas

[James Green <gnome cyberstorm demon co uk>]

On Sat, 14 Aug 1999, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> >  4) i used kde 6 months ago and gnome since then. Some friends used kde, still 
> >  use kde and tried gnome: they agree with me. Why are gnome applications much 
> >  slower than kde ? This is really noticeable even on fast machines and my P 
> >  233 with 96MB and 2MB video really IS slow. I understand that many parameters 
> >  may go into such a question and the question itself does not make much sense 
> >  but it is something i can see and it makes me angry.
> 
> First of all, make sure you are not running the pixmap theme engine.
> 
> Second, is this really noticeable?  This is not easy to measure.  We
> are always happy to take patches that fix performance issues in GNOME.
> Proper profiling needs to be done to see what is slow in the
> applications.

Well, I use pixmap gtk+ themes all the time, together with the cvs version
of e. You can compare with Windows9x in redraw times by saying that GTK is
slower to the point of noticbly lagging behind. This is prolly due to the
redrawing of the pixmaps, but it should be investigated for possible
improvements.

Another thing to notice though is that the loading of applications is
often slower than in Windows, GMC takes about twice the time that Explorer
does.

Finally, I've noticed that GTK does strange things:

1. Sometimes if you click to bring up a menu and move over the *expected*
location of the entry (i.e. before it's had time to actually draw the
menu) and then click when you see it (lag of around a second?) GTK doesn't
pick it up - you have to bring up the menu twice to have the entry pick up
mouse events.

2. When an app such as GMC which draws many gtk areas/widgets loads, there
is a noticable flicker effect as everything is added to the screen. Maybe
it would be better to stop the window from being drawn until the display
is internally finished and can be drawn from memory? This appear to be the
way Explorer does it (at least, Explorer does have a noticable delay with
no disk activity before instantly appearing on screen - presumably sorting
out directory contents before appearing).

Something for the Window Managers which I find really annoying - when I'm
using GIMP, often windows will appear below the current mouse pointer
location. By change this is often near the bottom of the screen, and
dialogues will pop up with their bottom-halfs off the bottom of the
screen. This is true though for many applications - if I could tell the wm
to always initially display windows fully-on-screen, then be able to
partially drag them off-screen later this would be a big usability
improvement for me.


-- 
James Green
http://www.cyberstorm.demon.co.uk/
Home of the demon.tech.modems 56k FAQ.