[CF-Devel] GTK Client performance

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

GTK Client 1.3.1

Ok, well, I know that my system is memory challenged, but this seems
ridiculous...

A room full of creatures like in the mushroom quest absolutely kills my
character... not because I can't fight, but because the client slows to
a crawl...   Keypresses seem to be processed at a rate of less than one
per second.  Before you know it, apparent lags of several minutes can 
occur because of buffered keypresses...  Then you lose track, and cannot
recover because it is very hard to get to the point where you know it is
processing current requests.

This occurs even with a Ring of War, and a Ring of Thieves, so my "speed"
is in the 2.5 range - keypresses are processed at a rate less that one per
second.  It is as though it is spending huge amounts of time trying to
process all the characters on the level or something...

It is directly related to the number of monsters on the level I am 
working.

The system is a P120, 80MB.  With X running, I  am  running on the
edge where swap has to be used, but, even swapping is done, it is the
number of monsters that kills the client, not the fact that swapping
is being done because in town or other maps where there are few creatures,
the client performs ok.

It does not seem to be a server issue, because when the server is on this
same machine, other clients like the Windows DX client do not slow down
when the GTK client is slow.  The slowness also occurs (in GTK only) 
when I'm using other servers on the net.  Other players on the same
server, on the same map, do not see the slowness with the DX client.

Any idea what I might set to make this less likely to happen?  Or if this
is abnormal?

I know that graphic caching might help for an off-system game server,
but with the server local, it seems this isn't really necessary...
Behavior is the same anyway... whether the server is local or not.

Lighting seems to be set to fastest.  SDL?  I don't know how that affects
speed or png graphics handling.

Could this be a graphic scaling issue?

Shrug, any ideas?

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