What?

GtkPerf is an application designed to test GTK+ performance. The point is to create common testing platform to run predefined GTK+ widgets (opening comboboxes, toggling buttons, scrolling text yms.) and this way define the speed of device/platform.

Why?

I know that bencmarking tools (including GtkPerf) can be fooled and don't give real-life results. Yet, I belive that GtkPerf can be helpful to solve for example this kind of things:

  • How fast is my hardware/software platform compared to others?
  • How fast/slow GTK+ is with different themes?
  • Is there any notably slow widgets when using my GTK+ theme(engine)?
  • How much does GTK+ performance increase when moving e.g. from GTK+ 2.4 -> 2.6?
  • How much does GTK+/GDK perfomance increase when updating X-server?
  • Can GTK+ be efficiently used in embedded devices?
There exist other performance tools but none to measure GTK+ UI speed. With this tool it can be done easily and repeated same way multiple times

Screenshots

Screenshots on maemo (maemo.org)

There is also "Hildonized" version of GtkPerf where UI is tuned to maemo platform.