We have a program which uses several different GL canvases, which
are either shown or hidden depending on the state of the program.
We running in to a performance problem due to the way Xforms
manages the contexts,
The basic problem is that whenever you show a canvas both the
Init and Activate property handlers are called, and whenever
you hide a canvas the Cleanup handler is called.
For GL canvases, the Init handler creates a new GLX context, and
the Cleanup handler destroys that context. Thus, every time you
show a GL canvas you need to completely re-create its context,
which in our case can be a fairly time consuming process (because
we have some large call lists which also need to be re-created).
So the canvas appears, but then there's a delay until something
is drawn waiting for the context to be created.
It seems to me that calling init/cleanup on show/hide is a little
drastic. It would make more sense to call init/cleanup on
create/delete, and activate/deactivate on show/hide, but that
would require a change to the Xforms API.
One work around I've considered is creating a couple of global
contexts maintained by the program, and modifying the init and
cleanup handlers to copy contexts back and forth as necessary.
I haven't tried this yet, and am interested in any comments
on how others may have addressed this problem.
Mike Blackwell
mkb@cs.cmu.edu
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