Re: panel startup time

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Mark,

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 17:22 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>  - loading the icon theme information (35%)
>      => Owen has a proposal that should go some way towards fixing this:
> 
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2004-April/msg00065.html

	If we're going to go this far - why don't we go with more of a
fontconfig type approach, that is done on a per-system basis; thus
saving first-time/space in users' home directory.

	Also - if we're going to have this file - please, please, please can we
include the icon data:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2003-May/msg00073.html

	Note particularly the warning about facile du -b usage.

	Since I wrote that, various discussions have convinced me that having a
const char *buffer in a GdkPixbuf pointing directly into the mmaped data
has not only excellent seek/load properties, shares the memory across
processes etc. etc.[1] - but also behaves nicely under memory-pressure,
since the kernel can page that stuff back out to file, and read it again
chunk-wise instead of jumbling memory page-by-page into swap.

	Anyhow - since I can't measure / prove this is a large speedup (except
by inspection), I'd only ask that we have an easy-to-check header flag /
space in the format for expansion somewhere to add this in future; is
that reasonable ?

	Then again, perhaps I've confused this with some totally orthogonal
issue ;-)

	Regards,

		Michael.

[1] - and more elgantly than compiling the stuff into a shared library
-- 
 michael ximian com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot