[squeak-dev] Why is the squeak gui slow? New clues.

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Tue Feb 16 22:24:05 UTC 2010


On 17 February 2010 00:15, Nicolas Cellier
<nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/2/16 Igor Stasenko <siguctua at gmail.com>:
>> On 16 February 2010 20:38, Jerome Peace <peace_the_dreamer at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Most of the time squeak is fast enough. Every so often the gui slows down to a crawl. The user moves the mouse around and the gui will not respond the way it did a moment ago. Movements feel spastic. The user overshoots the mark, moves back, over shoots again. Gradually learning to pause ...a...long...time...between...very...small...movements.
>>>
>>> I was recently trying to program some improvements and did something I think sheds a light on the reason.
>>>
>>> I was fooling with the handles for a star morph. There are only 6 of them. Currently they all are individual submorphs of the star itself. However it seemed it would simplify things if there was only one handle. The center handle would make a good holder for the other five.
>>>
>>> When I finally got that working I ran into the problem that I mentioned in the first paragraph. The mouse gui became extremely retarded (in the time sense). This is consistent with what happens if you should run a mouse over true type fonts or flash morphs. The event processing slows down till it is painful to adjust to.
>>>
>>> My previous thought was that only massive pixel processing (large amount of screen updates) would cause a gui slowdown. Now however I am beginning to realize that event dispatch must be a prime suspect as well.
>>>
>>> That's all the info I have at the moment. I pass this along incase someone has some confirming or alternate information.
>>>
>>
>> My 2 cents.
>> I played with morphic rendering code, where in my morph, all
>> attributes like color, border and many others retrieved from
>> dictionaries.
>> I expected that it may cause a major slowdown, but then discovered
>> that its not. It is slower of course, but not to the point, where it
>> becomes noticeable. So, i suspecting that bottlenecks is hidden
>> somewhere else.
>>
>> Another observation is, that if you open many windows, things become
>> slower and slower , in linear progression.
>> The fact is, that in browser windows, most time spent on rendering
>> text (using highly complex Text & font rendering code).
>> So, Text rendering is a major bottleneck. And if we want to make an
>> improvements, we should attack this area.
>>
>>> Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace
>>>
>>
>
> You can also try the preferences>debug>debug show damage just in case...
> At least, it shows a problem with splitters (they invalidate the menu
> bar... probably they invalidate at 0 at 0)
> BTW doesn't splitters of minimized windows upset anybody ?
>
it does.. :)

> Nicolas
>
>>
>> --
>> Best regards,
>> Igor Stasenko AKA sig.
>>
>>
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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