I just uploaded the sysprof-3.33.4 tarball as we progress towards 3.34. This alpha release has some interesting new features that some of you may find interesting as you continue your quests to improve the performance of your system by improving the software running upon it.
For a while, I’ve been wondering about various ways to move GtkTextView forward in GTK 4. It’s of particular interest to me because I spent some time in the GTK 3 days making it faster for smooth scrolling. However, the designs that were employed there work better on the traditional Xorg setup than they do on GTK 3’s Wayland backend. Now that GTK 4 can have a proper GL pipeline, there is a lot of room for improvement.
Thanks to the West Coast Hackfest, I had a chance to sit down with Matthias and work through that design. GtkLabel was already using some accelerated text rendering so we started by making that work for GtkTextView. Then we extended the GSK PangoRenderer to handle the rest of the needs of GtkTextView and Matthias re-implemented some features to avoid cairo fallbacks.
After the hackfest I also found time to implement layout caching of PangoLayout. It helps reduce some of the CPU overhead in calculating line layouts.
As we start using the GPU more it becomes increasingly important to keep the CPU usage low. If we don’t it’s very likely to raise overall energy usage. To help keep us honest, I’ve added some RAPL energy statistics to Sysprof.