Why does my simple GTK+ based app take 8 seconds to start up?

Question

Hi folks,

I wrote a GTK+ app whose .exe is small, but of course like all GTK+ apps it links with many DLLs (under Windows). What my program does at this point is construct a GUI that consists of a GtkWindow, GtkTable, and about 12 others widgets. That's it.

Yet when I start it up it takes about 8 seconds on my 2 GHz WinXP machine.

Is GTK+ just overly bloated?

I might add that before I started experimenting with GTK+, I started developing a widget set of my own (rather than pay to use MFC), and it adds essentially no delay at all to my program start-up.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In my experience GTK has not been slow or bloated on any platform I've used it on (including, coincidentally, a 2 GHz WinXP machine). Do you construct your GUI manually or using libglade or GtkBuilder? Can you post the code somewhere?

Answer 2

Could happen, for example if one of your 12 widgets is a GtkFileChooserWidget opening a directory with 2000 files or if the dlls needed by GTK+ are buried in the file system instead of being in the same directory of your application.

Answer 3

Are you sure it is only GTK which has a delay?

For example, does rxvt.exe also have a delay in starting?

I am on a machine which is a member of an Active Directory domain, but I am disconnected from that network. In my case, every msys/mingw application takes a few seconds to launch, and those applications which are built on msys/mingw occasionally pause or hang while running.