[New-bugs-announce] [issue33500] Python TKinter for Mac on latest 2.7.15 still extremely slow vs Windows

[Michael Romero]

New submission from Michael Romero <romerom at gmail.com>:

Hello, 

I have recently been working with a PAC-MAN project developed by Berkeley for their A.I. course.  My primary workstation is a Touchbar MBP (3.1ghz core i7 w/16gb RAM and an SSD).  I had noticed how PAC-MAN's performance would sort of... stutter, when running on my Mac, while performing incredibly quick on a nearby gaming computer.  I had previously believed it to be due to the differences in specs between systems.  This is not the case, however, as the performance of PAC-MAN is extremely quick even within a VM ran via Parallels on the same Macbook whose native python performance was extremely sluggish.

I have seen recent issues submitted here and supposedly resolved that are intended to address a performance issue with Tkinter and Mac OS/X.  While the underlying issue mentioned in those particular tickets may have been addressed, the overall performance difference between Mac and Windows (and perhaps others) with Tkinter on Mac has not been. 

The following URL includes the PAC-MAN implementation I'm referring to:
http://ai.berkeley.edu/project_log.html

The link above contains another link to download the "multiagent.zip".
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cs188websitecontent/projects/release/multiagent/v1/002/multiagent.zip

After extraction, running "python pacman.py" with a system running the most recent 2.7.15 64bit release (on a fully patched OS/X) will allow you to see the sluggish performance of PAC-MAN I'm describing when compared to the same exact codebase running on a Windows system (and perhaps linux, though I have not yet tried to run it there), on a Windows VM living on the same system.

----------
components: Tkinter
messages: 316520
nosy: Michael Romero
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Python TKinter for Mac on latest 2.7.15 still extremely slow vs Windows
versions: Python 2.7

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue33500>
_______________________________________