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O'Reilly article on current GNOME optimisation work

Submitted by Uraeus on Wed, 2005-11-02 12:11. GNOME

Jono Bacon have written a nice article on the O'Reilly network discussing the current set of optimisations work being done on GNOME. The article focuses on the work by Federico Mena-Quintero who started the effort with his work on speeding up the GNOME file chooser. Today this effort seems to be picking up speed with people such as Billy Biggs, Carl Worth and Behdad Esfahbod all working hard on various performance issues. In addition to that Nokia have sponsored some performance related work through their Maemo effort. Anyway, you find the article from Jono here and you can follow the optimisation effort live on Planet GNOME

which version of gnome-panel?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sat, 2005-11-05 09:29.

The gnome-panel used to behave as you mentionned but it does not seem to do it. I am now using gnome-panel 2.12.1 and the menu appears to be loaded when the panel start. In fact, I do not notice any significant delay the first time I use the menu.

I even made an experiment. I first created a BIG file larger than my memory (512MB) so I can use it to flush the disk cache.

# cat BIG > /dev/null
# time cat /usr/share/applications/*.desktop > /dev/null
real 0m0.502s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.008s
# time cat /usr/share/applications/*.desktop > /dev/null
real 0m0.005s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.002s

As you can see, loading a bunch of desktop files (114 of the 150 desktop files installed on my system) takes a noticeable time. The second run with the files already loaded in cache memory is about 100 times faster.

# cat BIG > /dev/null
# killall gnome-panel
# time cat /usr/share/applications/*.desktop > /dev/null
real 0m0.005s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.002s

The 'killall gnome-panel' is not recommanded but it should restart the panel.
We can see that the desktop files are obviously in memory so the panel must load them at startup even before the menu is accessed.

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