Re: Cannot Build GNUstep Apps

[Riccardo]

Hey,

On Saturday, December 3, 2005, at 11:40 PM, Jason Thomas wrote:

> I do have another small issue, which is performance over X.  If I am 
> running any gnustep apps (Gorm, GWorkspace, etc) over an X lan link, 
> graphical performance of the app is extremely poor, ie it takes up to 5 
> seconds for a repaint of the entire GWorkspace window. 

I brought up this topic many times and someone (rob burns? adrian 
robert?) also backed me up with some data. You will see that using Java 
with SWING will have a similar problem, using with AWT will not (hint 
hint...).
[see my posts around the 4th of may, with the topic "GUI performance 
issues with images and scrollers"]

I will sum up my points here:

- if you use the art backend, the delay is about expected. Art is 
thought to be used locally. I tis fast when done locally, but it 
essentially fills some rects witth the pixels and then ships them over 
the network (like swing does)

- the xlib backend _should_ be faster than art here and it is in fact. 
Still xlib backend sufers oteher perofmance problems: it seems to 
exchange a lot of data and making a lot of calls with the Xserver. If 
you have a slower computer or an xserver different than Xorg/Xfree (like 
the Xpmac found in older MkLinux) you might experience quite slow 
drawing even locally and if you watch cpu usage, the process consuming 
msot of it is X11 itself, not your application.

to sum up, I think gnustep has some performance problems that are common 
to both backends and some further problems in the xlib backend (the art 
backend is really thought to be used locally). You can notice this 
especially when scrolling bigger images for example, or with big tables.

Using X over a lan link just "exposes" the huge amount of exchange 
between your application and X.

Cheers,
   Riccardo