Re: Improving X 2D performance?

From: Andrew Reilly (andrew_at_gurney.reilly.home)
Date: 01/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 21:40:54 GMT

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 22:17:47 +0000, Tyler Eaves wrote:

> I've got a system running FreeBSD 5.2-R (x86). My graphics card
> is an ATI Radeon 9600, running the "radeon" driver in XFree-CVS.
> It works, but the performance is really lacking. For example, if I drag
> an app in front of a terminal, I can see the text on the terminal
> disappear for a split second before it redraws. At the same time,
> the window drag becomes very draggy. Also, apps with lots of text
> drawing are not very responsive (IE: gnome-termainal, xmms).
>
> Anyone have any suggestions?

gnome-terminal is particularly crap in this regard, for two reasons not
directly related to X.

1) Every time it re-paints, it scans the window contents for something
that looks like it might be a URL, so that it can do the
click-to-open-browser thing. I find that this can lock it up, busy, for
many seconds at a time, and all gnome-terminal windows are affected.

2) It (along with most modern gnome) has the option of anti-aliasing
fonts. Since X doesn't do font rendering, this means that the application
(via the gnome libraries) has to do the font rendering in the application,
and send the result to the X server as a pixmap. This involves vastly
more IPC bandwidth, and is probably slow for other reasons too.

Fortunately some of (2) can be turned off through the Desktop
Preferences->Fonts dialog, by selecting the "monochrome" option. Dunno
whether this actually lets X do its own font rendering, but it does speed
things up a little. You can avoid (1) by just using ordinary xterm
instead of gnome-terminal.

Cheers, 

-- 
Andrew

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