Testing required: visited link performance

I've just enabled NetSurf's visited link handling. This allows links that
have been visited to be rendered differently to unvisited links.

It was originally implemented several years ago, but disabled since it had
a detrimental effect on performance.

Since then we've made many improvements to the browser, so performance may
be more acceptable. However, most of the developers use fast hardware now,
so performance issues are harder to spot.

Please could people test builds #1177 and #1178 on a variety of pages and
us know how page load times vary? I am particularly interested to hear
from people using old hardware such as RiscPCs, Iyonixes, Ataris, etc.

We also need to know the size of your URL file. On RISC OS, if you shift
double click on the !NetSurf application directory and run OpenChoices,
your URL file should be in the directory that opens.

So a helpful report could take the form:

System: Iyonix
URL file size: 246K

Site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
Build #1177: 8.6s
Build #1178: 9.0s

Site: http://slashdot.org/
Build #1177: 5.4s
Build #1178: 5.7s


You can test whatever pages you like. Pages with more links on them
require more searching of the browsing history. Also, the more you use
NetSurf, the bigger the history to search (and the bigger the URL file).

Note that the absolute page load times can vary anyway, due to network
issues or other activity the computer is doing, so average timings over
several runs are best.

Cheers,

--

Michael Drake (tlsa) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/