A discussion these days on the
PHP-GTK general mailing list
revolved around the issue of feeding a large amount of rows to
the model bound to a GtkTreeView.
Marc
Quinton
pasted
a sample built to demonstrate the performance gain obtained by
disconnecting the GtkListStore from the
GtkTreeView while filling the list with data, just
like one would wrap such fills in a EnableControls /
DisableControls pair in Delphi.
Hard numbers
Surprisingly enough, he had to conclude the difference was not very significant, which seems rather counter-intuitive, so I thought I'd dig a bit deeper, and here are the data. The graph representing them is the one at the top of this post (click for larger graph).
| Rows | Fill while connected | Fill disconnected then reconnect | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First pass | Next passes | First pass | Next passes | |
| 2000 | 21,5 | 13,3 | 27,0 | 23,0 |
| 5000 | 20,0 | 12,5 | 26,3 | 21,7 |
| 10000 | 20,0 | 12.5 | 25,6 | 21,7 |
| 20000 | 20,0 | 12,5 | 25,6 | 21,7 |
| 50000 | 20,0 | 12,5 | 26,3 | 21,7 |
| 100000 | 20,0 | 11,2 | 24,4 | 21,3 |
| 500000 | 19,2 | 10,2 | 25,0 | 20,0 |
Results compiled on a 2.8 GHz P4, 1 GB RAM, XP SP1.
Side notes
Whatever option is chosen, the first pass of filling the list is always the fastest, presumably because it does not involve freeing the previous list first.
When choosing the "always connected" option, once the delay
spent filling the list has been expanded, there still remains a delay
for the GtkTreeView itself to catch up visually.
With the larger lists, this becomes costly too: with the 500k rows
list taking 26 (first pass) or 49 (next passes) seconds to fill, the view
still requires 29 more seconds to redisplay.
On the other hand, when filling the list in disconnected mode and reconnecting once the list is filled, the view answers fluidly, with no perceptible delay, giving this option a much higher edge over the simpler solution of staying connected than the raw numbers might suggest.
It looks like this technique should go into a "PHP-GTK Best practices" somewhere.
Now, for some real speed...
This will only be of interest to C coders on the edge of GTK development, it seems, but numbers are in an entirely different class: 3 millions rows in 4 seconds.
This turns out as 750 rows/ms, instead of the 10 to 30 rows/ms we've been discussing.