[Tutor] Making a large scale GUI interface run more efficently in TKinter/PMW

[Ike Hall]

Hello all,
I have been on this list for some time now (although this is a new 
registration address because of email address problems...thanks for your 
assistance Danny!), and have gotten some rather useful tips and tricks that 
have helped my python programming through the months.  Thank you all for your 
help (either by answering my questions direclty, or by answering someone 
elses).  Anyway, I have a new question that has been keeping me awake at 
nights squirming in the darkness.

First, it should be noted that I am not really a programmer...I am a 
physicist (grad student really) who only really wants to write enough 
programs as to make my life computationally easier.

anyway, back to the real question....

I am writing a rather large scale GUI Monitoring client for a rather large 
experiment.  this client will take in quite a lot of information which is all 
designed to tell us if the an apparatus is working as it should or not, and 
if it is not, the information being brought in will tell us where the 
problems are.  So the idea is to display the information graphically, because 
much of what we receive are histograms, Circular buffers (displayed like pie 
charts), and many many other things too...so anyway, there are thousands of 
these objects, and they get received OK and seperated into their respective 
"Geographic" reigons, then passed on to the display where they are displayed 
based upon their "geographic origin"....(I know this is long winded, but I 
want to be as detailed as possible without sending the entire 7 files that 
contain this program)  so now these things are displayed in various levels of 
notebooks in a PMW frame (for those unfamiliar with PMW, its just like the 
tabs on some GUI applications)  so that we can find where problems are.

Now the problem:

We receive this information every 5 seconds.  Currently, with the program 
drawing everything that gets sent, and in the right place, just the drawing 
of stuff takes well over this 5 second interval.  Is there any way to speed 
this up....like maybe perhaps getting the total pictures drawn in memory 'on 
the fly'?? or maybe even only drawing to the page that is being viewed?? I 
dont know if either of these options are possible,much less how to implent 
them, so if any of you happen to know of possible solutions, I would be 
THRILLED to hear them.

Thank you all
Isaac (Ike) Hall
University of Oklahoma