vtkVectorText::RequestData() is slow, optimisation is obvious
This issue was created automatically from an original Mantis Issue. Further discussion may take place here.
Profiling has revealed that vtkVectorText::RequestData() is a significant bottleneck in our application. Examination of the code reveals that this function performs work in a loop that could be moved out of the loop. The code in the loop is converting large string constants into ints and floats, but these strings are constant and so the conversion need only be done once.
In fact, the code could be rewritten to avoid the strings altogether and instead use constant arrays of floats and ints. This would have the benefit of avoiding locale problems also, and fix bug 1431 as a side effect.