Comment 16 for bug 657783

I am pretty sure the problem lies in Gnome Canvas. It allocates a gdk graphics context for every stroke, even when they are not visible. The attached patch to libgnomecanvas alleviates this problem: xournal will still be (very) slow in continuous page mode, but not in single-page mode.

I am not saying this is a good patch; it may break other programs depending on libgnomecanvas. You should regard this as a proof that the problem is actually where I'm saying.

Please test & confirm.