The New GNUstep Seems Slow

[Richard Stonehouse]

GNUstep built from the recent tarballs:

    gnustep-make-2.6.0
    gnustep-base-1.22.0
    gnustep-gui-0.20.0
    gnustep-back-0.20.0

runs but seems very slow. On launching GWorkspace, it takes approx
30 - 35 secs before a blank window appears, and a further 10 - 15
secs before this gets filled in with the file browser display. During
the whole of this time GWorkspace is taking nearly 100% of the CPU. In
the previous version (make-2.4.0, base-1.20.1, gui- and back-0.18.0)
the whole sequence used to take just 2 - 3 secs.

Other operations in GWorkspace, e.g. moving to an adjacent column in
the display, are also slow and CPU-intensive. Other applications,
e.g. SystemPreferences, show similar but less extreme symptoms.

It may well be that I've made an error in the build, but the only
obviously suspicious thing is a message in the gnustep-base build
output:

    "gnustep-base-1.22.0-1130.1-results.txt:checking for thread-safe
    +initialize in runtime... configure: WARNING: Your ObjectiveC
    runtime does not support thread-safe class initialisation.  Please
    use a different runtime if you intend to use threads."

The machine is single-processor and the Objective C library is

    libobjc45-4.5.0_20100604

from the openSUSE 11.3 distribution.

Is this a known problem? (I seem to remember some discussion of
diagnostic code slowing things down but assume this has been removed
in the tarball release).

If not, what further diagnostics would be useful?

-- 
    Richard Stonehouse