Vidalia performance problem in Network Map window
When Vidalia refreshes the relay list in the Network Map window it starts adding items fast but gets slower and slower. I'd guess it's exponential because it's apparently sorting it after each relay is added to the list, and refreshing the display too.
On my PC it takes 2 or 3 minutes for the full list to refresh. During this time it hogs the CPU and buzzes up the fans. If I close the window it takes about 30 seconds. Since it seems to refresh the list on its own periodically, Vidalia consumes hours of CPU time eventually. Other applications get frozen -- starved for CPU time during the refresh periods. [I expect this doesn't cause a problem on dual core machines but I don't have one to check.]
I always use Task Manager to reduce the Vidalia process priority to "Low", which prevents it from disrupting other applications, but it still gradually wastes CPU time.
A recent Vidalia update seems to have made it so that killing the Vidalia process now kills the spawned Tor process too, and since running Tor separately seems to mean having a command line window left open, this issue is more annoying now.
I can't quite remember how long it's been like this. A year? A year and a half? I always thought it was so obnoxiously obvious [on Windows, at least] it would be fixed in the next version for sure this time! Apparently not, so I'm reporting it at last. Please make it so that the relay list is filled in one go instead of refreshing for every relay. I think that will fix it. Thank you for reading.