Re: Progress bar on startup

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Jonathan,

On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 21:38, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> When I log in for the first time, I find that most of my time is loading
> libraries[1] from disk.

	Very under-convinced about that hypothesis ;-) log in with an Xterm,
and run 'strace -f -ttt gnome-session'.

>  The splash screen pops up, and sits for a while
> without actually updating anything.

	Ok; I think this can be due to a number of things; possibly pango font
initialisation - which most likely is done synchronously, before we
render an icon.

>  It then rushes through all icons almost immediately, then pops down.

	I think this is most likely because the gconf world has let us do do
really _lots_ of things in a single app: gnome-settings-daemon. This
takes an hefty chunk of time to start, and subsequently other things
take less time.

	Oh; and I think the situation is somewhat further confused by lots of
things being started asynchronously in parallel, thus finishing at
similar times ;-)

>  Half of the icons are the
> question-mark anyway, as they aren't listed in progress code.  Logging
> out and back in immediately leads to a fully logged in state almost
> immediately.

	Another point is - that this is not my experience on Suns - indeed, if
anything we need to make the splash persist longer, since there is a
long period of a blank backdrop, with no panel / nautilus after the
splash has disappeared.

> Given that machines are getting faster, and GNOME is getting much
> quicker to start up, what do people think of getting rid of the progress
> indicator? 

	Not a good idea IMHO for slow, remote machines where you can't hear the
HDD being thrashed for all its worth :-)

> It doesn't really show any useful information right now.

	Apart from the fact that "this 30 second login period is not a hang,
things are still happening ;-)".

> Alternately, we could try to delay the registering with the session
> manager until we're fully realized, which will delay the icon by a
> little.  I can also add a sleep (5) to the settings daemon too. (-:

	My feeling is that it might be nice to get more feedback from the
settings daemon as to precisely what it's doing "Started ESD" eg. so
that we can provide more useful feedback.

> Any thoughts?  Anyone mind if I write up a patch to remove this
> functionality?

	Yep; I'd object - as would lots of Ultra 2 users ;-)

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot