An Important GNOME Performance Fix Has Landed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An Important GNOME Performance Fix Has Landed

GNOME contributor Yussuf Khalil has managed to uncover and resolve a bug in Clutter that was hurting GNOME's performance...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Performance-Fix-Clutter

[Brisse]

"With this fix, the median frame-time drops from 16.97ms to 12.97ms."

Seems insanely high for just rendering the desktop.

[miskol]

They should start using low cost hw like raspberry pi or odroid c2
Only on this devices you can really see that gnome devs don't optimise rendering.
And only think that we need from gnome is to do stupid windows composition

[aufkrawall]

Compositor performance should never drop below fps/refreshrate in any case during normal usage. If it does, it's just bad.

[scottishduck]

Still not going to fix the threading issue they’ve known about for years that causes lag though, are they

[Jumbotron]

Good to hear that more bugs are being found and squished. Now....how about that massive memory leak ?

[Danny3]

I'm curious if this is one of the reasons that Cinnamon is so slow compared to KDE Plasma.

[wagaf]

"With this fix, the median frame-time drops from 16.97ms to 12.97ms."

Seems insanely high for just rendering the desktop.

That's approx. going from 60 FPS to 77 FPS, which is very slow for just the desktop on a modern development machine.

However it's good that they work on picking those low-hanging fruits :-)

As a user I find the display of seconds to be useless and distracting but it still should be optimized.

[carewolf]

Even if they were relayouting it... How would that be a major performance impact? Text-rendering can be expensive, but you have to render a screen full of it to matter, and layout can be expenseive if you need to handle advanced scripts, but latin like stuff like numbers are just variable length glyph that should already have their sizes cached.

[Creak]

That's approx. going from 60 FPS to 77 FPS, which is very slow for just the desktop on a modern development machine.

However it's good that they work on picking those low-hanging fruits :-)

I think 60 FPS is more than enough for a desktop rendering. Of course, it *could* be better, and probably should as well, but not *at all cost*: everything needs to be prioritized at some point. As long as the desktop is around 60FPS, I'm not sure optimization is the highest concern for a desktop environment. I'm not sure a user would see much difference between 60 FPS and 30 FPS on a classic desktop use. Maybe during animations...

As a user I find the display of seconds to be useless and distracting but it still should be optimized.

It's not just the seconds, the fix goes higher than that: it prevents from recalculating the layout of any widget if the new text in it doesn't change the dimensions. So it touches pretty much everything that has text in it.