[vtk-developers] Performance tuning

[Ken Martin]

I have checked in my first batch of pipeline optimizations. Brad and I are
still looking into remaining bottlenecks so there may be more optimizations
still to come but I wanted to get this first batch committed. So.... on my
test case which has a lot of little actors that do not change, each with a
~6 filter pipeline I am seeing about an 8X speedup in rendering times and
about a 10X speedup in total execution times. The current performance is
still slower than VTK 4.4 but we may still have some improvement left in
there. So far all of the performance improvements were pretty clean. The
composite data pipeline (aka multiblock and AMR) has not been looked at
carefully yet so it may still have some significant overhead in it. We will
look into that soon as well. If you do have a slow test case I would be
curious to hear how these changes impact your results.

Thanks
Ken