Bugzilla – Bug 8782
Scrolling through artists list is sluggish in the presence of non-ascii chars
Last modified: 2011-01-13 23:58:05 UTC
As long as I scroll via the artists with ascii names UI is very responsive. Once the point where artists with non-ascii names appear is reached UI becoming very sluggish. Not a deal breaker but quite annoying. If I have to guess it's associated with the way fonts are being handled or background picture with the character on it is generated... Controller firmware at the moment is 7.1 r2704 root@debian-build #99 Please let me know if I can provide any other help - I'm totally interested in having this fixed.
Nick: Can you please try the latest (7.1-21902) to see if this improves the issue.
James, I'm assuming you are talking about SC version. Tested with 7.2-21903 and 7.2-21928. Sluggishness is still there, very noticeable. Currently SC reports version as: SqueezeCenter Version: 7.2 - 21928 @ Sun Jul 20 02:05:37 PDT 2008 - Debian - EN - koi8-r Controller firmware is still the same: 7.1 r2704 Please let me know if there is anything else I can do. May be enable some debug printouts and send logs?
Nick, how big a list are you scrolling through? What percentage of the tracks have non-ascii characters? You aren't by some chance using a custom font, are you? Thanks for the info!
Just tried again with four items in Hebrew/Cyrillic - it's really slow. Western characters like French accents or German umlauts are fine.
> Nick, how big a list are you scrolling through? > What percentage of the tracks have non-ascii characters? SC reports 125 artists, I'd say half of them have Cyrillic names. > You aren't by some chance using a custom font, are you? Na, nothing special. I do have msttcorefonts pack installed, but that rather common in Linux (or at least Debian) world.
> Just tried again with four items in Hebrew/Cyrillic - it's really slow. I'm so glad to hear that! Hopefully means the problem going to be fixed soon :)
Just to be clear: This is scrolling on the controller AND you have a non-standard font installed on the controller?
> This is scrolling on the controller Correct. > AND you have a non-standard font installed on the controller? I did not even know it's possible.
yes, but it's a bit of a hack. Richard: any idea?
I've got an idea - it does look exactly as artificial delay you introduce when one reaches the end of the list before rolling over .... Very easy to check - suppress this delay completely, see what will happen ...
I need to look at this in more detail but I think the rendering of Hebrew/Cyrillic characters with the current font and freetype is slow on the Controller. It is planned to change the rendering to use the Cairo/Pango libraries see bug 5407, this may help but we have not evaluated these libraries on the ARM processor yet. We will probably need to profile rendering Hebrew/Cyrillic characters and see what optimizations can be done.
This won't make 7.4. Tom will likely be looking at integrating Pango.
Great! I love to see milestone adjusted :) P.S. Does fix really going to make it to 7.4?
Sorry for the confusion. We have adjusted the names a bit so that 7.4 is the version number of the next major release, and will likely be renamed to 8.0 to convey all the good new stuff in it, including (hopefully) this fix.
Tom is no longer available to us