Re: gtk performance testing [was Re: GNOME 2.11/2.12 targeting GTK+ 2.8 (ie cairo based)]

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 6/9/05, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:
> On 6/9/05, Jon K Hellan <hellan acm org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 14:39 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > >       If we're talking about performance/stability in the context of whether
> > > GNOME 2.12 should use GTK+ 2.8, we're effectively saying "I think the
> > > GTK+ team might ship a unstable or unacceptably slow 2.8.0 release;
> > > GNOME shouldn't commit to using GTK+ 2.8 yet". I would hope that we
> > > would have more confidence in the judgement of the GTK+ team than that.
> >
> > Crashes and performance are very different types of problem. Crashes get
> > fixed once they can be reproduced. Fixing bad performance can take a
> > long time.
> >
> > Well, I haven't tested gtk2.7 since just after Cairo got added, so I
> > can't tell whether there is a performance problem. Has anybody got
> > numbers?
> 
> I haven't seen this announced on gtk-devel or here, so:
> 
> http://gtkperf.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Apparently this is a test tool to test gtk performance. Would be great
> to have someone test 2.7 with it.

Went ahead and did it myself. TextView is brutally slower (300-400%),
some other things are 25-30% slower, and some things actually get
faster. Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure I did this right and I'm linking
against the right stuff, but these numbers should be confirmed by an
expert, and I can't speak to the validity of the tool's measurements
itself, except to note that scrolling in a textview area is *visibly*
slower.

The data: 

first 'column' of times is gtk 2.6, second is gtk/cairo HEAD of
yesterday, both with the Mist theme:

GtkEntry - time:  0.43 0.76
GtkComboBox - time: 12.61 15.30
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 11.95 13.25
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.65 1.09
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.53 0.87
GtkToggleButton - time:  2.17 4.42
GtkCheckButton - time:  3.41 3.27
GtkRadioButton - time:  4.29 3.96
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 91.88 268.67
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 43.17 190.83
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  8.40 8.48
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 13.38 13.58
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 48.70 29.99
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 11.71 11.46
 --- 
Total time: 253.31 565.94

HTH-
Luis