Re: gnome-metadata

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Sun, 29 Aug 1999, Tom Tromey wrote:

> Elliot> Buzzwords sound nice, but it has a performance & memory
> Elliot> penalty that we can't just ignore.
> 
> You know this how?  I doubt the changes I made to gnome-metadata are
> even measurable for a non-threaded program.

Yes, and we get all these people adding features with "hardly measurable"
performance hits, and they all add up, and now people call GNOME slow with
some justification.

My panel takes about five-ten seconds to pop up a terminal, and it's not
running on a particularly slow machine. I know threads aren't to blame for
this, and they probably wouldn't cause an extremely noticeable slowdown,
but they will cause a slowdown, and you haven't given any profiling to
make sure that it really doesn't slow things down a noticeable bit.

My main point is that guessing & wishing that it won't slow things down is
not enough. We need to make a conscious effort to verify that GNOME is
going to be fast, so that it works nicely on those pokey P5-90's that
everyone is using to play with Linux for the first time, and so that it is
snappy on the faster boxes that people typically use today. Right now we
are far from the ideal.

-- Elliot
The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!