Comment 0 for bug 499156

Binary package hint: freecol

I was having extremely slow performance from freecol, as somebody else described in this thread:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freecol/forums/forum/141201/topic/3269853
"Sometimes when I click another part of the map it takes a really long time to move, like 10-30 minutes long. It's easily overwhelmed. I dare not click too quickly, because then I know it will slow down on me. This is especially cumbersome when I'm trying to give troops goto orders, or select troops from another part of the map. The whole game seems rather slow. I'm running .8.2 in ubuntu jj."

I tried uninstalling the openjdk -- namely, running "dpkg -r openjdk-6-jre" and "apt-get remove openjdk-6-jre-headless".
From the output of the second command:
(Reading database ... 313213 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing icedtea-6-jre-cacao ...
Removing libaccess-bridge-java-jni ...
Removing libaccess-bridge-java ...
Removing openjdk-6-jre-headless ...
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/keytool to provide /usr/bin/keytool (keytool) in auto mode.
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/rmid to provide /usr/bin/rmid (rmid) in auto mode.
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/rmiregistry to provide /usr/bin/rmiregistry (rmiregistry) in auto mode.
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/orbd to provide /usr/bin/orbd (orbd) in auto mode.
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/jexec to provide /usr/bin/jexec (jexec) in auto mode.
Removing openjdk-6-jre-lib ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place

After this, I ran update-alternatives to make sure I was running Sun's Java 6. Now when I run the game (freecol), it is very responsive and playable. Yay!

I'm not sure what the problem was, nor do I think I have the technical skills to figure it out. I can offer one hint, however: running 'top' during playing the game, with OpenJDK, showed that 73% of CPU time was consumed by Xorg, and 20% from Java, so it is certainly some kind of graphical inefficiency.

details:
Distro: Karmic, freecol 0.8.3+dfsg-1, xorg 1:7.4+3ubuntu7, openjdk-6-jre 6b16-1.6.1-1ubuntu3 (slow!), sun-java6-jre 6-15-1 (works!)