accessing stock icons during startup

["Padraig O'Briain" <Padraig Obriain Sun COM>]

While looking at gnome-panel startup in GNOME 2.12 on Solaris I noticed
that about 110 ms was being used in gtk_style_init() when created the
first widget, the panel toplevel. This may not sound like a lot but I
have noticed that the same thing seems to occur in the 11 processes
listed below which start during GNOME startup:

gnome-settings-daemon
gnome-session
metacity
gnome-panel
nautilus
wnck-applet
gnome-volcheck
clock-applet
notification-area-applet
gnome-netstatus-applet
mixer_applet2

A lot of this time is spent accessing or attempting to access stock
icons. Snippet of Solaris truss file below. You should see similar on
linux by running strace on the startup of a GNOME program.

475/1:        22.6064
access("/usr/share/icons/blueprint/stock/16x16/stock_apply_20.png",
F_OK) Err#2 ENOENT
475/1:        22.6066
access("/usr/share/icons/blueprint/stock/20x20/stock_apply_20.png",
F_OK) = 0
475/1:        22.6068
access("/usr/share/icons/blueprint/stock/16x16/stock_cancel_20.png",
F_OK) Err#2 ENOENT
475/1:        22.6069
access("/usr/share/icons/blueprint/stock/20x20/stock_cancel_20.png",
F_OK) = 0
475/1:        22.6071
access("/usr/share/icons/blueprint/stock/16x16/stock_cdrom_16.png",
F_OK) = 0
475/1:        22.6074
access("/usr/share/icons/blueprint/stock/16x16/stock_cdrom_24.png",
F_OK) Err#2 ENOENT
475/1:        22.6075
access("/usr/share/icons/blueprint/stock/20x20/stock_cdrom_24.png",
F_OK) Err#2 ENOENT


The stack trace for the access call gives some idea of what code is
being executed:

        libc.so.1`access+0x4
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_check_pixmap_dir+0x18
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_find_pixmap_in_path+0x34
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_parse_icon_source+0x94
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_parse_stock+0xb4
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_parse_style+0x568
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_parse_any+0x130
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_context_parse_one_file+0x148
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_context_parse_file+0xfc
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`parse_include_file+0xc0
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_parse_statement+0x8c
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_parse_any+0x130
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_context_parse_one_file+0x148
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_context_parse_file+0xfc
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_parse_named+0x124
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_rc_reparse_all_for_settings+0x228
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_settings_get_for_screen+0xcc
        libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.800.6`gtk_style_init+0x14
        libgobject-2.0.so.0.800.3`g_type_create_instance+0x268
        libgobject-2.0.so.0.800.3`g_object_constructor+0x18

Lorenzo's document,http://www.gnome.org/~lcolitti/gnome-startup/analysis/,
refers to an icon cache.

Is the icon cache in GNOME 2.12 and is it supposed to address this problem?

Padraig