[Tkinter-discuss] Tkinter slows down

[Tim Jones]

On Jan 7, 2008, at 2:06 PM, Cam Farnell wrote:

> I'm creating a program which displays spreadsheet-like data using
> hundreds of labels. At first this works fine, however after a few
> redisplays it starts slowing down dramatically.
>
> A small test program, without the distractions of the real program is:
>
> from Tkinter import *
> def Go():
>      LabelList = []
>      for J in range(30):
>          print J

Cam - this next line is probably the culprit.  Calling forget doesn't  
delete the instance of the control, so when you create the new Labels  
below, you're building a huge stack of controls.  I'd recommend  
simply updating the label text so that you reuse the existing controls.

>          for L in LabelList: L.grid_forget()
>          LabelList = []
>          for Row in range(20):
>              for Col in range(20):
>                  L = Label(r,text='%s'%J
>                  L.grid(row=Row,column=Col)
>                  LabelList.append(L)
>          r.update_idletasks()
> r = Tk()
> r.after(1000,Go)
> r.geometry('800x600')
> r.mainloop()
>
> This runs quickly at first but gradually slows down to a crawl during
> the latter iterations. Anyone have any idea what is causing this to go
> slow or how I could speed it up? I'm running Python 2.4.3 on an Ubuntu
> 6.06 system.

HTH,
Tim