[Ardour-Dev] SuperRapidScreenUpdates are neither rapid, nor super.

John Emmas johne53 at tiscali.co.uk
Sat Mar 7 05:32:40 PST 2009


A couple of weeks ago I updated my copy of Ardour 2.4 to the latest svn
(2.7.1).  I must say that I was very disappointed at how horrible and clunky
the "moving timeline" display mode has become.

In trying to track this down last week I came across a function in
gtl2_ardour/ardour_ui.cc called 'ARDOUR_UI::SuperRapidScreenUpdate()'.
It's clear that this was originally intended to update the screen 100 times
per second (presumably to facilitate the moving timeline display).  There's
a note that seems to suggest that by August 2007 this had apparently dropped
to 40 times per second.  Fortunately I have a backup copy of Ardour 2.4 and
I was able to measure its refresh frequency (yesterday) to be 24 updates per
second.  But in V2.7, refreshes seem to be languishing at less than 5 times
per second - hardly rapid, or super...!

Now here's the thing....  visually, there seems to be very little going on
in 2.7 that wasn't already going on in 2.4. This has got me wondering if
there's a lot of stuff being done on in the UI thread that shouldn't really
be there.  If this problem isn't already being ivestigated (and there's a
list somewhere of the changes between those two versions) I'd be happy to
see if I can track down the culprit.  Or has the UI thread just reached te
limit of what it can do?

Cheers,

John




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