[Geany] Editor performance

Jakub Misak jmisak at xxxxx
Fri Dec 5 00:33:32 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.

The binary "nvidia" driver makes no perceptible difference whatsoever.

> Firstly:  The NV driver is non-accelerated

No, it's not. It is a 2D driver supporting 2D acceleration.
The binary driver also offers 3D acceleration, (broken) XRender
"acceleration" and things like that.

> GTK on the other hand, IS accelerated, or rather is designed to
> be, and relies IIRC on XLibMesa.

It has nothing to do with XLibMesa. If anything, working XRender
acceleration may help, as well as using compositing, but I really doubt
it would help too much in things like moving the cursor and stumbling
on a matching pair of braces.

> (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).

Geany and SciTE are definitely the only two GTK+ applications I've
tried using 100% CPU for scrolling. And I've been using many GTK+ 2.x
applications for many years, on Linux, BSD and Windows. GTK+ is slow
everywhere, with any driver and any graphics card on any OS, which has
been a well-known problem for many years (with tons of endless
discussions and no conclusions). But it's not *that* slow. Scrolling in
GTK+ definitely does not need 100% CPU with the nv driver.

> Secondly: People seem to always want to compare apples to oranges.  this has
> already been covered, GNOME/GTK !+ KDE/Qt, Scintilla != Emacs/Vim.

Comparing Geany with the KDE-based editors is completely fair,
interesting and reasonable. What you're saying is equivalent to "you
cannot compare the Linux and FreeBSD kernel performance, because
they're two different kernels!", or "you cannot compare the rendering
speed of various web browser engines (Gecko, WebKit etc.), because
they're different rendering engines!"

Of course that's the whole point of performance comparisons -
comparing different products. And that's why such comparisons are so
popular and made so often on various websites. If a KDE based editor can
do the same things with 50% less CPU usage than its GTK+ counterpart,
then it's interesting to ask why.

> 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?

Firstly, I was not complaining, I was asking. Secondly, I don't know
what world you're living in, but in my world, mentioning a deficiency
in a product I use is perfectly legitimate and normal. When someone
spots a weak point in something he's using, it is actually desirable to
talk about it, in both commercial and free software communities.
Progress is the thing that's turning the world around.
"Silently accepting the flaws in everything I use" will never lead to
anything, it just conserves the current status quo forever. The earth
stops spinning.

> 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.

See above. 

> 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.

What actually bothers me is that you don't know what you're talking
about (see the graphics driver stuff), then you're teaching me nonsense
based on these mistakes, and then you're telling me that I
have no right to complain about anything.

So while I accept your right to reply to my post (that's why I'm
posting it to a public mailing list), next time I would prefer if
you did so only if you really had something to say. Thank you.



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