[Xquartz-dev] pymol launches slower under Xquartz/MacPorts X11

Jack Howarth howarth at bromo.med.uc.edu
Fri Mar 5 20:27:55 PST 2010


Jeremy,
   I have noticed an oddity in the launch behavior of X11 pymol
when built against the newer Xorg from MacPorts under Xquartz
2.5.0-beta2. If you install pymol from MacPorts and launch it
by executing pymol on the terminal, the Pymol viewer window
will appear almost immediately but there is very long delay
before the upper Pymol tk interface window appears. This
contrasts to launching the fink pymol package on the same
machine with Xquartz installed. In the fink case, the initial
startup of pymol shows a much smaller delay between the
appearance of the Pymol viewer window and the Pymol Tk
interface window. Since both are running under Xquartz,
I assume the difference in launch time is due to the X11
libraries in use. For fink pymol this is...

[Macintosh-2:pymol-py26/modules/pymol] howarth% otool -L _cmd.so
_cmd.so:
	/sw/lib/libfreeglut.3.dylib (compatibility version 12.0.0, current version 12.0.0)
	/usr/X11/lib/libGL.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.2.0, current version 1.2.0)
	/usr/X11/lib/libGLU.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.3.0, current version 1.3.0)
	/sw/lib/libpng12.0.dylib (compatibility version 36.0.0, current version 36.0.0)
	/usr/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.3)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 123.0.0)
	/usr/X11/lib/libX11.6.dylib (compatibility version 9.0.0, current version 9.0.0)
	/usr/X11/lib/libXext.6.dylib (compatibility version 11.0.0, current version 11.0.0)

but for MacPorts pymol, this is...

[Macintosh-2:pymol/modules/pymol] howarth% otool -L _cmd.so
_cmd.so:
	/opt/local/lib/libglut.3.dylib (compatibility version 3.7.0, current version 3.7.0)
	/opt/local/lib/libGL.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.2.0, current version 1.2.0)
	/opt/local/lib/libGLU.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.3.0, current version 1.3.0)
	/opt/local/lib/libpng12.0.dylib (compatibility version 41.0.0, current version 41.0.0)
	/opt/local/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.3)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 125.0.0)
	/opt/local/lib/libX11.6.dylib (compatibility version 10.0.0, current version 10.0.0)
	/opt/local/lib/libXext.6.dylib (compatibility version 11.0.0, current version 11.0.0)

I'll see if I can eliminate this regression by building MacPorts pymol against a MacPorts
freeglut package instead of stock libglut from Mesa used in MacPorts.
            Jack
ps This slow launch has been seen before on linux...

http://www.mail-archive.com/pymol-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg05243.html.

Note that this is a delay on first launch of pymol and not successive launches
for that session.


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