Hello all,
Long story short I’m developing a touch interface in C which runs on a Raspberry Pi CM4 - not a supercomputer but more than powerful enough for this problem I would hope.
The interface is very simple - a grid of 50 buttons that get modified (label, image, colour, style) either individually or all together to display different functions.
However, the modification of the buttons takes a visibly loooong time, between 1-5ms per button per change - so if you modify the button image, button label and button CSS in one hit it can take a very long time (multiplied by 50 buttons) to update the screen.
I’ve done a fair bit of timestamping in the code and found that the gtk button/pixbuf functions are taking almost all of the time:
Call Time (ms) approximate
gtk_button_set_image 1ms
gtk_button_set_label 0.5
gdk_pixbuf_scale 0.5
gdk_pixbuf_new_subpixbuf 0.4
gtk_css_provider_load_from_data 0.3
gtk_image_new_from_pixbuf 0.15
So the question is - am I doing something wrong / missing something or is there a way to speed this up?
Even just stopping GTK from re-drawing anything while we’re updating all the buttons would be a visual improvement.
This code runs plenty quick enough on my Linux development machine, so I’m not ruling out that it’s some issue with the Pi - but I find it hard to believe a 4-core 1.5GHz machine with nothing else to do can’t re-draw a simple UI in a frame or two.