[Geany] Editor performance

[Enrico Tröger]

On Thu, 4 Dec 2008 01:35:25 +0100, Jakub Misak <jmisak at centrum.cz>
wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I found Geany some time ago, searching for a simple, small IDE, and 
>while it definitely looks very nice, the thing that surprised me 
>the most was how incredibly slow the editor was. I tried many
>different editors before, and while GTK+ based ones have always been
>slower than others, with higher CPU overhead, I've never seen anything
>as slow as Geany (and SciTE, to be fair) - for example, in a C++ file,
>holding the left/right keys (so the cursor keeps going to left/right)
>consumes over 50% of CPU and it even stutters, stumbles on brackets,
>holding the up/down keys is even more CPU intensive, the editor
>actually cannot keep up with the cursor movement, the same with

I never experienced such heavy problems with just moving the cursor. I
must admit, I'm mostly working on my desktop, an Athlon 64 X2 4600+.
But I can't remember noticing such behaviour with my laptop (1.5GHz
Celeron) nor with my old desktop (1.8 GHz Athlon single-core, IIRC).


>scrolling (which is slow and laggy - the scrollbar cannot update
>itself fast enough, it jumps instead of moving continuously), and also

Yeah, that is Scintilla. It is known that Scintilla performs not that
good on scrolling. It was reported several times to Scintilla but Neil,
the developer stated that it is not is highest priority to work on this.
Feel free to fix the code, make things better and ideally provide a
patch. It's open-source.


>it does not lag so much. The extremely slow editor also affects the
>main menu redrawing performance - when a blank file is open in the
>editor, the menu can redraw as fast as in any other GTK+ app (i.e.
>fast enough), with a plain text file, it's slower, but when a .cpp
>file is loaded, again the redrawing is extremely slow, the menu cannot
>keep up with the mouse (when I ride through the menu from left to
>right, for example).

This is almost completely independent from Geany, the menu is drawn by
GTK. Except for a few callbacks which are ran when a submenu is opened,
Geany itself isn't involved there.


>Now, I know it sounds as if my computer is broken, but when I compare
>it with other editors: for example in emacs, the CPU usage while
>holding the arrow keys is about 0% (even in the GTK+ version), other,

Never ever compare Geany with emacs. Also the GTK version of emacs is
in no way comparable. The editing widget of emacs is not based on GTK
whereas Scintilla is.


>more modern and heavyweight editors like the Kate-based ones (KDE)
>consume about 2-3 times less CPU cycles than Geany does for these basic

This is again incomparable because KDE != GTK.
 

>tasks like selection, typing and scrolling, the same applies even to
>the gedit editor in GNOME, with its syntax higlighting - even though
>it's GTK+ based, there are no lags and 100% CPU usage at all.
>
>Is there anything that can be done about it? Or is it just my computer?
>It's a 2.4 GHz P4 with the nv driver for X.org, tried it on Debian and
>Arch Linux, which are both pretty lightweight to begin with... Is the

Same here. I'm using Debian since years, switched lately to ArchLinux
for a few months but finally back to Debian.
Except for the known scrolling performance issue, I'm afraid to not
know what's the problem.
Of course, Geany is not as fast as emacs, no doubt on that. But your
described behaviour when switching between menus, is really GTK. But
your system should be fast enough to not cover such issues, IMO.


Regards,
Enrico

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc
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