Re: Removing xrdb for 10% startup win?

[Lorenzo Colitti <lorenzo colitti com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> xrdb is first called by the X init scripts, then later *again* by
> gnome-settings-daemon.
> xrdb is also invoked by the default GNOME Xsession script:
> [...]
> I'm guessing that possibly Lorenzo didn't have any of these files
> in his test setup. (Fedora always has a system Xresources file. I don't
> know the situation for other distributions.)

Indeed: I didn't see this because I was compiling trunk gdm2 on Debian, 
in which /etc/X11/Xresources is a directory containing three resource 
files, which the default gdm setup doesn't see (it expects 
/etc/X11/Xresources to be a file). In the stock Debian configuration, 
xrdb is called by gdm as part of the default session (three times), and 
then again by gnome-settings-daemon.

> To put it another way - we don't get the win by just removing
> grdb, we need to get rid of xrdb calling cpp altogether.

The same startup performance win could be had by switching the system 
startup scripts so that they call xrdb with the -nocpp switch. This 
would probably not do any harm: at least on Debian, the stock X11 
session files do not contain any #defines, and I expect this to be 
similar in other distributions. If this were done, it would be trivial 
to switch the code in gnome-settings-daemon so it didn't require cpp to run.

I don't know what other people think, but to me it just seems silly that 
the whole C compiler is loaded when starting up X, just because there 
/might/ be some #define statements somewhere, which, even if they were 
present, could be replaced by a simple sed command in 99% of cases.


Cheers,
Lorenzo