[Users] [Bug 2584] GUI redraws itself slowly

[Michael]

ok i checked this out, with latest kernel from debian unstable and claws with a message list (which means for my large screen and large fonts that about 15 messages are shown, and only Subject and From columns).

No significant delay anymore now ! This is stock debian linux kernel 3.0.2, nvidia v. 290.10 (which is faster than the Xorg generic 'nv' driver, and have GL) compiled from source with gcc 4.6.2, and claws 3.8 cvs16. 

Although kernel 2.6.39 still is faster, but the delay for linux 3.0.2 now is less than maybe 300 microseconds, which is about ok.

However, as soon as i launch gnome-settings-daemon (gsd v. 3.2.2) the delay is guessed up to 1,5 seconds, which is ugly. This is switching between workspaces. Delay is also significantly slower when switching between different folders (i.e. change the message list) within claws. This delay is less than 1s, but several times slower than without gsd. Comparing other GTK apps: gedit, terminal, and firefox. They generally do not show any delay at all.

But then i tried 2 pane file manager gnome-commander and it have a comparable high delay. And again, only with gsd running.

This is a 4 years old box now, only average, not a Gaming PC but it should be still running without such delays. Hardware is 2x2GHtz AMD64, GeForce7300 (256Mb), 3G RAM (and nearly always less than 1G used no matter how many desktop apps i launch) in Dual Mode. 

Out of curiosity i compared firefox rendering engine, with lists like ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_amphibians but there is no delay.

So, at least for this machine, i am tempted to blame the GTK theme engine. Anything is set to defaults, which is theme 'adwaita', and any extras and any desktop features turned off (although this is WindowMaker, not gnome-shell, but just in case gsd would try to handle such things.) But maybe the code is doing something silly for lists (maybe like querying the same font over and over? Updating the same data over and over for every list item again ? 

Interestingly, there is no theme selector whatsoever in gnome-control-center, or anywhere in the default session (AFAIKS), one have to install inofficial gnome-tweak-tool to select from only a handful themes and have some few options. Before gnome-3 there was a luxury theme configurator, and many default choices, so they must have changed a lot internally.