[Interest] Optimizing performance with hundreds of widgets

[Gibbs, Matt]

Hi All,

I’m working on a Qt-based project to display rapidly updating information from a control system.  I want to display hundreds of signals, each updating at about 10 Hz.  As a performance test, I’ve thrown 500 Labels in a grid layout, and fire a timer every 100 ms which calls setText on each label.  This ends up being surprisingly CPU-intensive: on reasonably modern hardware (2012 MacBook Pro), I use 70% of one CPU.  This doesn’t leave me much overhead to do anything else.

Are there any best practices to reduce CPU usage in this case?

Cheers,
—Matt

Matt Gibbs
SLAC Accelerator Operations Group
mgibbs at slac.stanford.edu