Slow Gtk2 client?

[telex4]

I'm not posting this as a bug in the tracking system because I'd like to seek confirmation from others first...

Has anyone noticed bad, slow performance with the GTK2 client? I've been using CVS, but I assume it's the same in 1.14.1...

Freeciv clients tend to be quite slow when ending moves and when lots of units move around (especially with the AI who seems to like to mov EVERYTHING every round ). Moving the focus away from units seems to speed it up, but even then the GTK2 client seems an awful lot slower than the SDL client. Once I'm late in a game, I end up getting disconnected from my server over and over again due to ping timeouts.

Has anyone else experienced these problems? Or is it just me?

[Per]

Does it happen only occasionally, like units moving faster in the beginning of the game, then start to 'lag' later in the game? This is a 'known' elusive bug that we really need more information about. If you can manage to figure out just when and under what conditions it happens, we'd be very happy.

If you just want units to move faster, then see the client options. You can set their 'smooth move' delay.

[telex4]

Yes, it is fine at the start of a game, which I guess is because there aren't many units about. But it consistently lags later in the game.

The client is particularly bad, as I said, when moving units are in the screen area.

These two patterns make me think that it is the client trying to handle all of the units moving, which can be a lot of information when you have three or four AI players shifting hundreds of units around.

The client also gets progressively worse the longer it runs, so if I enter a savegame that is far advanced, with many units, and continously restart the client, it isn't as bad as if I just run the client over a period of turns.

The GTK2 client is far worse than the SDL client, though both suffer from it.

That's about all I can think of for now. If I notice any other patterns, I'll try to investigate them and post about them here. I can't really do much else though, since I don't know C and I don't have the time to read through the code to try and get an understanding of what the client is doing at particular times (and hence be able to guess what is wrong).