[cairo] Reducing CPU usage in News Ticker Implementation

[Darwin Bautista]

Thanks for all the replies.

On 9/1/07, Chris Wilson <chris at chris-wilson.co.uk> wrote:
> Darwin Bautista (djclue917 at gmail.com) said:
> > I just want to know if there's a more efficient way of implementing a
> > news ticker. Currently, I'm using my own "Cairo-fied" version of the
> > ticker widget used in pyt!ck (
> > http://whatah.nyunderground.net/code/pytick/ ).
> As pointed out, caching the layout in a surface pattern is the standard
> response to such speed issues.
>
> > The problem is that
> > the ticker consumes a lot of CPU when the Pango layout is relatively
> > big (377 character-long text, DejaVu Serif Semi-Condensed 40) since X
> > performs a lot of redrawing every second (e.g., 50 redraws/second if
> > the scroll timeout is set to 20ms).
>
> The question arises as to identify the bottleneck and is it worth
> fixing. In this case, the issue appears to be that we are causing X to
> render glyphs that will never reach the widget. On the Cairo side we
> have a few opportunities to cull glyphs that will never be visible. As a
> demonstration, the attached patch culls the glyphs before adding them to
> the Xlib glyph stream - as it appears to be the easiest place to perform
> the culling.
>
> Applying this patch causes the CPU usage to become negligible, a drop
> from 20% on my machine. (I've also attached the updated ticker.py that I
> was running as my benchmark.) However, it remains to be seen whether it
> brings sufficient benefit across the desktop to justify its overhead.

What version of Cairo are you using? It seems that the patch was
diff'ed against a different Cairo version. I'm using Cairo 1.4.10.
 Thanks.

-- 
Darwin M. Bautista
BS Electronics and Communications Engineering
University of the Philippines Diliman
http://www.darwin.uk.to

University of the Philippines Linux Users' Group
http://www.uplug.org