I've given up on actually trying to make it go faster.
My biggest problem is that when I'm inserting the html, the application slows down to a crawl.
I have a progressbar, and I'm calling
QCoreApplication.processEvents()
(I'm using pyqt, by the way)
Can I put insertHtml() into a different thread, so I don't have an unresponsive interface?
How would I go about that? I've looked into QThread and QThreadPool, and I'm not quite sure where to begin.
In GUI applications, the main thread
is also called the GUI thread because
it's the only thread that is allowed
to perform GUI-related operations.
-- from the Qt Docs
So, no. Unfortunately you cannot perform that operation in a thread.
Edit: Technically, it is possible. I just wrote a short snippet that did so, however using Qt GUI objects in that way is highly unsafe.
I had this problem as well, here are a few things I did to make it faster:
TxtBrows->setAcceptRichText(false);
TxtBrows->setContextMenuPolicy(Qt::NoContextMenu);
TxtBrows->setOpenLinks(false);
TxtBrows->setReadOnly(true);
TxtBrows->setUndoRedoEnabled(false);
This should get rid of unneeded overhead.
Also when inserting large amounts of text its good to turn off screen updates:
setUpdatesEnabled(false);
TxtBrows->append(SomeBigHTMLString);
setUpdatesEnabled(true);
This was recommended somewhere in the Qt documentation but I can't find the spot just now.
[Edit]
I stumbled across the spot in the Docs (just in time for them to be outdated by QT5 grinn) http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qwidget.html#updatesEnabled-prop