[GNOME_n00b]

Originally Posted by techieMoe

You seem quite sure of this. Do you have a benchmark study or some numbers to back this up? I've run other X11 applications in OS X (such as OpenOffice.org) and not noticed any appreciable slowdown.

i was reading one recently. i think it was at digg.com, but not too sure.

[techieMoe]

In an attempt to see if GIMP was indeed the culprit, I tried creating a comic last night in Photoshop. Ironically, I'm more used to the way GIMP does things now and I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to get Photoshop to do what I wanted. I think at this point I'm going to deal with the slowdown in GIMP until I can find a more viable alternative. Projects such as Seashore are promising. Unfortunately at this point in its development it's actually significantly slower than GIMP despite being a native program.

[fingal]

Sounds like a bug to me. Do you have any way of measuring memory usage during your work with the GIMP?

[techieMoe]

Originally Posted by fingal

Sounds like a bug to me. Do you have any way of measuring memory usage during your work with the GIMP?

Yes, there's a process monitor equivalent to "top" in OS X. Next time I sit down to do some work I'll keep an eye on the RAM usage. Perhaps there's a memory leak somewhere in my version of the GIMP.

[fingal]

Originally Posted by techieMoe

Yes, there's a process monitor equivalent to "top" in OS X. Next time I sit down to do some work I'll keep an eye on the RAM usage. Perhaps there's a memory leak somewhere in my version of the GIMP.

Yes, I suspect a 'memory leak' from having read so many threads in here on similiar issues. As I'm not a developer though, I'm not sure what causes this? Does it mean there's some code which doesn't define limits to memory usage for a specific function?

If so your RAM would fill up progressively as you work ...

EDIT: It's okay: I read this. It suggests that not all misuse of memory is a 'leak' ... So maybe your cache is filling up while you work for example.

[techieMoe]

Originally Posted by GNOME_n00b

i was reading one recently. i think it was at digg.com, but not too sure.

I don't mean to dismiss your statement. I've been reading about performance issues with Apple's X11.app (which is required to run GIMP since there is no native port of GTK+), so it's very possible that my issues are stemming from that. I just don't want to jump to any conclusions.

[carlosponti]

Moe maybe you should start down the path of a native port of GTK and release it back into the community. i would assure you alot of people would appreciate it.

edit: i spoke too soon http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx

[techieMoe]

Originally Posted by carlosponti

Moe maybe you should start down the path of a native port of GTK and release it back into the community. i would assure you alot of people would appreciate it.

edit: i spoke too soon http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx

I've found a couple of projects for this, but one has had no activity for over a year and that one you linked to doesn't seem to be very active. Porting GTK to OS X can't be that easy of a thing to do or I imagine it would have already been done. I'm not sure I'm up to to that monumental of a task.

[carlosponti]

it kinda sucks if you ask me. the way they have gimp implemented is about like using wine to run Microsoft IE.

[techieMoe]

Originally Posted by carlosponti

it kinda sucks if you ask me. the way they have gimp implemented is about like using wine to run Microsoft IE.

It is indeed, and I agree that it sucks. There aren't many other options at this point. I might look into setting up a dual-boot with Linux on my MacBook. So far there aren't a lot of tutorials on that that don't involve phases of the moon and goat slaughtering.