[Geany] Editor performance

Thu Dec 4 21:09:53 UTC 2008

Personally, I see that a lot of people are using the nv driver and
expereincing slow gtk performance.  Unless I am mistaken, and I'm fairly
cerain I'm not, this can be explained and is NOT A COINCIDENCE.  My
apppologies to those of you using nvidia who will ultimately agree with
this.

Firstly:  The NV driver is non-accelerated, which means that it is able to
use the full capabilies of the card (frequency, height, width, etc), however
is does so at the most basic level imaginable, the nv driver *allows*
function.  GTK on the other hand, IS accelerated, or rather is designed to
be, and relies IIRC on XLibMesa.  IIRC, that means that when an activity
(like scrolling) is activated, it's going to use 100% CPU becuase CPU's
aren't optimized for graphics processing (It generates a lot of flops).
Conversly, using 'nvidia' AND minimal Effects (Enables GLX) WILL reduce the
CPU load for scrolling, depending on your graphics processor.  At some
level, a slower GPU WILL cause scrolling to lag/jump, but less-so than using
a processor for the same operation.

Secondly: People seem to always want to compare apples to oranges.  this has
already been covered, GNOME/GTK !+ KDE/Qt, Scintilla != Emacs/Vim. Perhaps a
more inteligent argument would be to use vi/vim as the editor instead of
scintilla.  If this is what you want, you probably don't want geany.

Sixth & Lastly: Complaning about performance (that is the idea of this
thread, no?) seems silly to me.  When one uses a software product so defined
by choice, one should function within the bounds of that aim, eh? If this
application (geany) doesn't meet your needs, then find a better solution.
If this is the best solution for you, then, I'm not sure why you're making
the complaint.

Thirdly: If you are largely offended by the above, and feel that my
commentary is offtopic or out of line, please consider me ignorant and rude,
as you probably already have.  It remains that if you considered this a bug,
you would have posted it as such, but rather than doing so, you have made it
a topic of discussion, and I largely respond by saying that geany is NOT
slow, nor are scrolling or any other operation slow. IMO, especially as
compared to Industry standards such as ecliplse, visual studio, etc, geany
is quite quick, especially where it counts.  I have selected geany over
those, based almost entirely on speed and features.

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 8:33 AM, Enrico Tröger <enrico.troeger at uvena.de>wrote:

> 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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Benjamin West
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