callgrind

GNOME Crosswords renders its puzzles with an elegant grid-and-overlay system—until it needs to do it at scale. In this post, I dive deep into profiling its rendering pipeline, using tools like Sysprof, Callgrind, and QCachegrind to uncover bottlenecks in the SVG stages. What started as a slow thumbnail issue turned into a fascinating journey through performance profiling, call graphs, and the surprising overheads inside librsvg. With guidance from mentors and insights from real-world data, we’re reimagining how puzzles get rendered. It’s a story of curiosity, exploration, and optimization.