[Scribus] on scribus 1.3.2cvs on MacOSX

[Andreas Vox]

Roberto wrote:

> Andreas
>
> Many thanks for your effort to keep scribus aqua up-to-date.
> This newer version surely feels better than the previous one. However I
> still find scribus-aqua so slow. From loading simple text sla documents
> to creating boxes and dragging things around - everything visibly lags.

Hm, dragging things around might not be snappy, but it's quite fast 
here ( ~ 1/10 sec delay the first time I touch a frame)
Some other action take a very long time:
* opening or creating a new doc: the current code uses Qt's XML code 
which is just to slow.
* switching dialogs: some issue with Qt/Mac which will improve hopefully
* Typing text: Scribus' text system will be rewritten during 1.3.x and 
I'll take care that it *does*get snappy then.
Also we are on the move to replace the graphics system with cairo. 
While that will slow down things in the beginning, I hope it will give 
sped improvements in the future.

> I know this is to be considered beta software for now, but I feel kind
> of disappointed at Scribus-aqua speed on my Dual 2 GHz G5 workstation.

Another thing: The Scribus binary is not optimized for your system. 
This will happen automatically by OS/X when you start/restart Scribus 
several times. Did you do that?
Don't judge Scribus' speed by its first run!

> You mentioned "another patch which came up only after the 1.3.1 release
> that is a clean-up to eventhandling by MrB which enhances speed
> drastically." Could you release another bundle including this patch?

That is already in.

> At this point, my doubt is: can we really expect scribus aqua to reach
> the same performance it has on Linux?

Yes. Maybe not numerically the same, but close enough.

> Is this speed issue only a problem
> with the current stage of development or with QT apps running natively
> on Aqua?

It's a mixture of things. Some speed enhancements just didn't make it 
in yet, current build doesn't use as much optimization as might be 
possible,
Qt/Mac isn't as optimized as Qt/X11, the Mach/Darwin/OSX system makes 
some things slow which are no problem on Linux, etc.
One think which is really abominable on OS/X is the speed of the memory 
management system. When I run  the profiler, sometimes half of the time 
is spent in malloc, destructors or free() !!

> Don't get me wrong. I really am a supporter of OSS and I look forward 
> to
> the time when I can switch to scribus for all my DTP needs. I'm just a
> little anxious to see things happen.

Don't worry. By the way, how does Quark or InDesign speed compare to 
their Windows / Linux versions? (hm, do they have Linux versions at 
all...)

Ciao
/Andreas