Is it just me, or did 21.3.50 get a whole lot slower?

[John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org>]

I haven't been building from CVS sources in a half a year, so I'm
sorry I don't have a more recent comparison.  I've been using Debian
21.2 package for active development these past months.

Anyway, I built 21.3.50 the other day, and ran it on my 300 MHz
Pentium-MMX laptop (which has 96 MB of memory).  I had just been
coding for three hours using 21.2, so I had a good sense of how fast
it ought to have been.

First I noticed the nifty new color schemes, and fading modelines.
However, I also saw that it was WAY WAY slower than 21.2.  'M-x' took
0.2 seconds to show a prompt; there was a lag on inserting characters;
RET at the end of a line waiting up to 2 full seconds at time.  I
turned on garbage collection messages, but Lisp memory usage didn't
seem abnormal.

What I did notice is lots and lots of screen flicker.  It seems that
refreshes were happening very often (maybe once every few seconds),
which is very different from 21.2, where flicker just never happens.

Has anyone else seen this, or might this just be an oddity of my
system?  I will try to track this down more.  I compiled with "-g
-O2", without Xaw3d or scrollbars or graphics support.  I am using
Mule.

John