Re: do we really need xrdb?

[Lorenzo Colitti <lorenzo colitti com>]

James Henstridge wrote:
> The question was: if gcc has already been paged in (e.g. by a prior xrdb
> call), does this change provide any noticeable benefit?

No, it doesn't.

> The previous discussions seemed to indicate that the largest performance
> wins would come from not paging gcc in at all, which will only happen if
> either (a) all xrdb calls use -nocpp or (b) xrdb uses a different C
> preprocessor.

That's right. xrdb is already called by the X session startup scripts, 
and that's where you take the startup time penalty (because you have to 
page in cpp). So even if you removed xrdb completely from GNOME startup, 
you wouldn't gain anything.

The right approach is to tell xrdb to use a lightweight cpp, such as 
mcpp or tcpp (although I don't know if tcc has an option to preprocess 
only without compiling).

There is a patch in freedesktop.org bug 4325 to use other preprocessors 
by default if they're available at runtime, but the only feedback I got 
on that was that xrdb should detect the preprocessor at compile time 
instead of at runtime, which seems worse to me since if you then 
uninstall that processor your xrdb breaks completely.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4325

Any suggestions?


Cheers,
Lorenzo