Xft performance with XEmacs 21.5.28 on Mac OS 10.5

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an chéad lá de mí na Samhain, scríobh 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.

XFT performance with XEmacs has gotten significantly better since then; but
that was low-hanging fruit like avoiding re-initialising XFT each time a
font was created(!), and caching XftDraw structures. My experience on a
single-processor Mac Mini bought in April has not been as bad as you seem to
be describing—not stellar, but workable. IIRC I’m not using X11 2.0, that
might be the difference. 

Are other XFT apps as slow for you? Could it be that the fontconfig cache
was not created?

 > 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.

I suspect the Carbon branch will have reasonable performance too, if you
want to try; seeo
http://mid.gmane.org/18176.10457.454322.26615@parhasard.net . 

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

-- 
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more into contact with civilization, Dobrinton was bitten by a dog which was
assumed to be mad, though it may only have been indiscriminating. (Saki)