[techtalk] Re: Browser reviews (was Re: [grrltalk] YA intro)

Rik Hemsley rik at kde.org
Thu Feb 10 01:26:46 EST 2000


#if Nils Philippsen
> You have to differentiate between themed widgets and themed widgets that
> use pixmaps. Themed widgets alone don't make much speed impact as they're
> basically just another color or another font, or different spacing,
> behavior, etc. Pixmapped themes are much slower (than non-pixmapped) but I
> don't think this is different with KDE. I can understand that they eat
> X-server memory as you have to store every pixmap inside the server.

Ok, mosfet, our themes guru, has invented his own terminology for this.

A 'style' is a widget theme that is implemented with code, i.e. no pixmaps.
A 'themed style' is one that has pixmaps, gradients etc.

It's true that there's no perceptible speed difference between the
two on my lowly K6/233.

If a pixmap is used in the theme, it's only stored once.

Gradients are drawn using The Fastest Gradient Code In The World (tm) :)
We did a trade with the blackbox people. They had some damn fast simple
gradient code. We gave them some complex gradient code.

> Just for the record, with recent gtk+ and gtk-themes, I don't notice much
> slowdown even with the "Pixmap" theme (which is the worst of all w.r.t.
> this). Of course, I have a somewhat faster 'puter and I am biased on this
> issue, but who isn't?

I see. I did expect that this would be sorted out. I'm glad it has,
because I like pixmapped widgets (remember XawXPM ? :)

> Maybe someone can shed some light on to what's the main problem with
> pixmapped themes (in GTK).

My experience with GTK (using the version of Gnome on my SuSE 6.3 CDs)

1. When an application starts it loads all the pixmaps needed by
   the theme. This happens for each app you load.

2. The pixmaps aren't freed from the X server properly, so your X
   server just gets bigger and bigger.

3. Drawing is very slow. I think this is the fault of Imlib 1.

As you say, this has improved. This is just what I saw last time I
used GTK themes.

Cheers,
Rik

-- 
285. Find beauty in the breakdown.

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