Hexchat: Poor performance on OSX

Created on 18 Sep 2014 · 7Comments · Source: hexchat/hexchat

I'm a bit new to Mac (just set it up a couple of days ago in fact), but I have HexChat setup and when my HexChat window is up on both my PC & my Mac I'm noticing that there is a few seconds delay before the text hits my Mac's client.
Both clients are connected to my ZNC server & both computers are hardwired to my network. There is no lag being reported by the client & the delay seems to be caused more so by the software than network connection. These delays can also be noticed with text being sent out, when I press the enter key it takes about a second or so before the text shows up in the main chat view, though it is instantly on my Windows client screen.
I however can't be certain this is an issue particularly with the HexChat software or Mac itself. If I could run any tests to help better determine the cause of such a delay feel free to let me know & I will run them.

OSX

Source

xnite

Most helpful comment

Any news on this bug? I just installed Hexchat on my Mac for the first time and noticed this as well.

btorellALTA on 12 Jun 2015

👍3

All 7 comments

The text widget HexChat uses is custom and some of its performance 'hacks' do not work on OSX. On top of that cairo/gdk/whatever seems to be slower in general on OSX. So it adds up to an extremely laggy experience that is not an easy thing to solve.

TingPing on 18 Sep 2014

@TingPing that's understandable, and it's a much better bug than most of the applications I have been trying to use (Gedit for example crashes everytime I try to resize the window), so the fact that it's even usable on Mac is good :)

xnite on 18 Sep 2014

@xnite Unrelated but what version of gedit? 3.13 has had a ton of work done to it for a fairly solid osx release

TingPing on 18 Sep 2014

It may or may not be directly related, but even on Windows some slowness can be encountered on a reasonably recent (5 years old) laptop. I noticed slowdowns in text rendering when another application is doing constant almost-fullscreen updates and rather extreme performance breakdowns when dragging another window over HexChat. With a 1920x1200 fullscreen window and power saving mode enabled (I think the CPU is clocked around 800 MHz in that case), updating the complete IRC window takes maybe half a second and I can see every line being rendered separately.
Maybe it would already help to lock the drawing surface during rendering? The fact that I can see every line being rendered separately kinda gives me the impression at a lot of unnecessary on-screen blitting is being done, so making sure that everything is rendered in an off-screen buffer might help.