tkinter redraw rates

[fronagzen at gmail.com]

Hm. So I've written a GUI in tkinter. I've found two performance issues, I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

Firstly, I'm using an image as a border, namely:

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import ttk

root_frame = Tk()
root_frame.configure(background = 'black')

img1 = PhotoImage("frameBorder", data="""
       R0lGODlhQABAAMIHAAAAABkfLTMrMzMrZjNVZjNVmUFch////ywAAAAAQABAAAAD9A
       i63P4wykmrvTjrzbu/hlGMZGmeaBp2QmgIQSzPdG3fbShk+u3/wFkONAgaj7aBoWIo
       Ip9P5aQFrSJfkpd1C2xluWDfEhIKm2mrh/bM9qrZ8MDYYYiz54263Yxn6PdgfQt/gF
       uCCoSFVYcAiYpPjI6PR5GTVpWWUJiZV2SckJ6flKGiQZulP6eoN6qrNa2uM7CxMbO0
       trG4rrqrvKi+pcCiwp/EnMaZyJbKk8yPzorQhdKA1HuRMLQ0bnSSuYyN2mhZ2eLcD1
       TicjtZ3sPgfu7J8A0EBOWfQxg5a4/87BtcCBxIsKDBgh8SKlzIsKHDhxAVJgAAOw==""")

style = ttk.Style()
style.element_create("RoundedFrame", "image", "frameBorder",
                                  border=30, sticky="nsew")
style.layout("RoundedFrame", [("RoundedFrame", {"sticky": "nsew"})])

input_frame = ttk.Frame(root_frame,
                        style = "RoundedFrame",
                        padding = 15,
                        width = 640,
                        height = 180
                        )
input_frame.pack(padx=10, pady=10)

This works, yes, but is annoyingly laggy on an older computer when I try to move the window around. I figure it's because the program has to keep redrawing the image border when dragged around, and is exacerbated by the fact that I have two of the imageborder frames in my application. How can I remedy this? I've tried using a hard-drawn image on a Canvas instead of the image border, but it's suboptimal because that prevents resizing the window.


The other performance issue I've found is that when the logic is running, the app doesn't redraw. Ordinarily this would be acceptable, but as part of my program, it loads data from a website, and during the load, the window completely freezes up and doesn't respond until the download is done; as I understand it, tkinter doesn't redraw until it is forced to by .update() or control is given back to the mainloop. How can I force a more frequent redraw rate?