Four down, ~six to go

Posted by Andreas Aardal Hanssen on April 14, 2008 · 4 comments

Greetings from Helsinki airport. I came back from my visit to Milan (thanks Riccardo for arranging the sprint, it was great to be there!) at around 02:30am this morning. Now I’m waiting for my connection through Frankfurt to go to Brazil.

I chatted with Thiago, who’s there already, and he said it’s a good 28C degrees in Sao Paolo right now. Here I am with my suede leather jacket, long jeans and a sweater, my suitcase has only black t-shirts in it, no sun glasses and no sunscreen, feeling pretty silly. He-he! ;-)

Milano was fun, I think I’ll want to sign up for more of those events in the future. My idle task was optimizations in QGraphicsScene’s sorting and transform code (I’ve managed a 15-30x speed-up so far, will submit changes to main/4.5 some time when I come back, see patch below). There’s still more optimizations to come, I think I’m just in the flow with this stuff now. Fun to help out with the port to using QGraphicsWidget, and also with some work we did to speed up the SVG cache. Sorry that I couldn’t stay for the API review. :-/

I’m bringing some feedback home to our team in Oslo:

* QtSvg could use some optimization work
* It would be very nice if QtSvg covered the entire SVG 1.1 Tiny standard
* I should write a blog or a Qt Quarterly article (or both) about tricks to make graphics fast / like device space pixmap caching for static content.

Now I’ve been in Helsinki, holding a presentation about our ideas for improving widgets, theming, animations and the like. Fun and interesting! And now I’m headed to Brazil to do the same. Wee!

PS: Apply to Qt it you have problems with performance with deeply nested structures in Graphics View: http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/scene-speed.txt (no warranty!)

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4 comments

1 stelt April 14, 2008 at 4:51 pm
 

You/Qt also presenting at the SVG world conference, this year in the South of Germany?
See http://svgopen.org for the opportunity

2 Rob April 16, 2008 at 9:01 pm
 

Andreas – Glad to hear of the huge speedups to QGS. I’ve got scenes with between 300 and 600 thousand items in them, and things bog down pretty badly when selecting and dragging. Profiling the code puts much of the blame on qt_closestItemFirst(), so I’m happy to hear that’s faster. Any idea when it’ll hit the builds? Thanks, Rob

3 hhartz April 17, 2008 at 12:46 pm
 

When you’re back in Norway I will show you how sunburnt you can get from spending 4 hours in a boat on Lake Travis in Texas. Get some sunscreen! ;-)

4 Thomas Gern April 17, 2008 at 8:21 pm
 

Hi Andreas,

I could not get the information to which version of QT this patch could be applied?

Best regards,

Thomas

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