Re: GUADEC Hacking

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Nat Friedman wrote:

> One of the operations I would like to see optimized is login speed.  It
> takes a pretty long time to login on most GNOME desktops, and I think it
> would be great if we could improve the login time (how long it takes
> before icons appear on your desktop and you can use the menu or panel
> launcher to launch an application).

I agree that its getting really poor and I have tested to see how much 
of this is being caused by disk seeks (rather crude test - log on so 
that all disk activity is cached - kill the X server and then log on 
again - on my machine it takes 17 seconds with lots of disk activity to 
log onto Gnome from a cold start whilst a hot start with very little 
disk activity is down to 4 seconds)

The culprit is pretty obviously GConf which is why I'm glad DConf is 
considering having a DB backend to address this. The short term fixes 
which Havoc has already suggested (moving the schema crap sideways and 
possibly mmap'ing some things) should cut some of that down but only a 
properly indexed database will give you both speed and memory efficiency 
(mmap'ing stuff is obviously wasteful memory wise).

jamie.