[news.eclipse.tools] Re: Slow performance on Linux GTK 2.1 M5

[Werner Punz <werpu@xxxxxx>]

Gunnar Wagenknecht wrote:

> I tried 2.1 M5 this morning on a completly fresh Linux box (Gentoo 1.4rc2,
> XFree86 4.2.99.4, Gnome 2.0.3). X and Gnome run really fine and also
> accelerated with my Matrox G400 and nice anti-aliased fonts. The machine
> is an Intel Pentium III 700 Mhz with 512MB RAM, 80GB harddisk with around
> 1 GB swap space.
> 
> I installed Sun JDK 1.4.1_01_i586 and Eclipse 2.1 M5 for Linux GTK. The
> first thing I noticed is the really slow feedback from Eclipse itself.
> Clicking a menu or button takes time.
> 
> Examples:
> 
> click toolbar icon for "New Project Wizards"
> -> around 15 Seconds till wizard choose dialog appears
> 
> It's really slow. I can't work as fluent as in Windows. Any ideas what
> might cause this? Is it Eclipse? The Sun JDK?

Probably a combination of a handful of factors
a)The GTK is generally a tad slower than the Motif port

b)The Sun JDK is slower than the Blackdown JDK when it comes to client
applications

c)The GTK2 speed of eclipse is highly dependable on the skin used. With the
standard GTK2 skin you should have acceptable performance but once you
start using some aqua like skins you might get performance slow as
molasses.
Generally the GTK2 speed on M5 is acceptable. Unfortunately there are a
handful of bugs, which I haven't nailed down yet enough to send in a bug
report. I don't know if they are GTK version specific (I cat total hangs
with remote debugging onto a running tomcat and with creation of new
directory from the navigation pane)

d) I personally think you can get an additional speed boost by applying the
preemptive kernel and low latency patches to the kernel.

Anyway give the dead ugly Motif version a try (deinstall lesstif first if
you have that on your machine), try another JDK. The speed should be in an
acceptable range. Not as snappy as the windows version but snappy enough.
For a snappy version either use the motif version or port SWT to Qt and/or
the fox toolkit :-) (which is by far the fastest toolkit under Unix I've
seen so far)