Xft performance with XEmacs 21.5.28 on Mac OS 10.5

[William Gallafent]

Hi,

I recently built (using XCode 3.0 toolchain, on Mac OS X 1.05) XEmacs  
21.5.28, targetting X11 with xft. My configure line was:

./configure --with-xft=emacs,tabs,menubars,gauges --with-mule --with-x  
--x-includes=/usr/X11/include --x-libraries=/usr/X11/lib --with-error- 
checking=none

This builds, installs, and runs well under Apple's X11 2.0, except for  
one thing: font redraw is glacially slow! (This is on a 4x2.66GHz Mac  
Pro...)

I found the thread titled "Xft performance" in the Apple X11-users  
list, which was started by Eric Knauel on 2003-07-28 (!), but no  
particular conclusion was reached there.

Since I'm seeing a significant performance problem here with the  
latest Apple tools and hardware, I'm hoping that I can help to fix it  
(either in XEmacs or in Apple's X11) by doing some diagnostics on this  
machine to determine where the problem lies. XEmacs built in a similar  
way running on e.g. stock Kubuntu 7.10, on significantly slower  
hardware, does not exhibit this performance problem.

So, what information should I gather (this might be a good way to  
learn my way around "Instruments"!)