Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!nntp-server.caltech.edu!toddpw
From: toddpw@nntp-server.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: System Disk 5.0.3 and two observations
Message-ID: <1990Nov8.220315.18509@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 8 Nov 90 22:03:15 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Lines: 29

jb10320@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Desdinova) writes:

>In article <cbCO0By00WB2MkonVT@andrew.cmu.edu> (Brendan Gallagher Hoar) writes

>>One thing that still bugs me is the scroll speed in the View by Name
>>in the Finder.  Even with a GSX and 5.0.3 it is very much slower than
>>a Macintosh Plus!

>>Not sure what the problem is.

>  I'm not sure, either. That really bugs me about the Finder. The only
>thing I can think of is that they use a really, REALLY bad sort routine,
>and sort every time you want to scroll up or down.  It's the only thing
>that makes the least bit of sense. Either that or they're trying to 
>fill a huge grafport with file information. 

Bingo. Finder is trying to draw ALL the text for the ENTIRE directory without
doing any form of trivial reject analysis on the visible text. Quickdraw on
the GS has what I believe to be a serious yet silly algorithmic flaw -- it uses
some really inefficient algorithm for processing regions and worse, does no
pre-clipping at all, especially with text. Text is so slow because all the off
screen text is still drawn, it just isn't actually transferred to the screen
in the final step.

My guess is that getting rid of this problem will take some major roto-rooting
of Quickdraw, so we'll have to wait for system 6.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu