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Scrolling ran at 44-46 fps on a 2x128x64 chain and 14-17% of frames took 41-53ms, which reads as judder. Four independent causes, each measured on the hardware; details and the diagnostic recipe are in docs/SCROLL_PERFORMANCE.md. The high-FPS loop slept a flat 8ms after every render. display() has already blocked on the panel's vsync by then, so that sleep was added to a wait that had happened: ~4ms of render plus 8ms put each iteration at ~12ms against a 10ms refresh grid, so every swap missed a refresh and the loop settled at 50fps while asking for 125 -- with no headroom, so a further 14% of frames slipped again. It now sleeps only the remainder, with a 1ms floor so plugin threads still get the GIL. ScrollHelper stepped position on a wall clock at 1/scroll_delay steps per second. Plugins set scroll_delay to the frame period, so that comparison sat exactly on its own threshold: a frame arriving a hair early moved zero pixels and rendered an identical frame, dirty-tracking skipped the swap, it returned in ~2ms, and the beat repeated. No scroll_delay value tunes that out -- a shorter delay trades stalled frames for periodic double-steps. Both modes now accumulate elapsed time at the same configured speed, so position stays proportional to real time. Sub-pixel blending goes back to off by default. It renders a half-step by mixing two adjacent columns, which on a coarse panel showing pixel-font text alternates crisp and smeared frames and reads as shimmer -- visibly worse than integer stepping on the hardware. Vegas mode still opts in. disk_cache uses orjson when importable, falling back to the stdlib. Encoding a ~1MB record drops from 14.8ms to 5.4ms end-to-end, and that work holds the GIL while a marquee is on screen. display_manager also checksummed the whole framebuffer twice per frame (dirty tracking, then the preview snapshot); the snapshot now takes the checksum the caller already computed. New src/common/scroll_config.py resolves scroll settings in one place. Five ticker plugins each hand-rolled this and disagreed: odds-ticker ranked the deprecated scroll_pixels_per_second above the documented scroll_speed/delay pair, and because that key carries a schema default the documented settings were dead for every user (ChuckBuilds/ledmatrix-plugins#408), while ledmatrix-leaderboard read the same key only as a fallback. The resolver also warns when a speed will not advance a whole number of pixels per refresh, which is the property that actually determines whether a scroll looks smooth. scripts/build_rgbmatrix_nogil.sh rebuilds the rgbmatrix binding so it releases the GIL. Upstream declares SwapOnVSync without nogil, unlike SetPixel/Clear/Fill beside it, so the render thread held the GIL for the whole vsync wait and starved background threads into long uninterruptible bursts. The script patches, builds and self-verifies into a scratch tree; --install backs up the original and rolls back if the service does not come back healthy. Measured after: 100 fps locked, no stalls observed, render thread down from 51% to 19% of one core. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>