Re: Future of desktop splash screens - some thoughts

[Franco Catrin <fcatrin tuxpan com>]

El s� 16-10-2004 a las 19:23, Alan Horkan escribi�...]

> I was asserting anything.  Some sort of feedback would definately be
> required but providing it in the form of a branded splash screen is just
> an unnecessary advertisement and a different question entirely.

The splash screen prevents the user trying to click on icons/menus when
the system isn't yet ready for use.  Without splash (like windows), the
user tries to open applications, and once the system can do something
useful the screen is full of all the applications requested for the user
just for testing if the system was ready or not.

> It would be great if startup could be made a lot faster, it irks me that
> while GDM is waiting for me to login that nothing is happening in the
> background.
> The dead time during login is a massive bottleneck during the whole
> startup process and I'd love it if GDM could somehow preload some or
> all of Gnome while it is waiting for input.

I've been doing some experiments with preloading.
My machine has a slow disk, I made several tweaks that gives the
perception of having a faster system to the user.  I got a summary in
spanish in my blog[1].  These are the actual results:

Test machine is a P4M/2.8Ghz, 4200RPM hard drive, 512MB in RAM
Fedora Core 2 + Xorg 6.8

1. Boot until gdm is ready for login
Before: 60 or more seconds.
Now: 35 seconds

2. Login and have an usable gnome-session
Before: 36 sec
Now: 20 sec

3. Start openoffice for the first time
Before: 22 sec
Now: 5 sec

4. Start epiphany for the fist time
Before : 6 sec
Now: 1 sec

The tricks that I've made are not for everybody, they are fine tuned for
my machine.  This is what I do on every stage

1. Boot until gdm is ready for login
- at the beginning of rc.sysinit I use readahead  to preload X+gdm
asynchronously
- rc.sysinit has several features disabled, like checking for selinux
and quotas
- gdm is the first service to run.  I only exec /sbin/ifup lo before
- xdm is disabled

bottlenecks:
- kernel boot time (8 seconds)
- usb initialization
- it seems that I'm not preloading enough


2. Login and have an usable gnome-session
- after gdm shows up, I begin preloading gnome-session, gnome-panel,
nautilus, xscreensaver, xcompmgr, metacity and gconfd with readahead
again. It doesn't take so much time

bottlenecks:
- gnome-session is slow to show up the fist icon, I haven't seen on the
code
- gnome-panel loads all the icons and menu entries (more than 1500 files
here)????

3.Start openoffice for the first time 

 and

4. Start epiphany for the fist time

- files for this applications are preloaded with low priority once
gnome-session is up.  I use gnome-session-properties to add this task

All preloading is done with readahead.  A small app that loads a list of
files.


[1]
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tuxpan.com%2Ffcatrin%2Fes%2Fcomments.php%3Fguid%3D20041028&langpair=es%7Cen&hl=es&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

-- 
Franco Catrin L. TUXPAN
http://www.tuxpan.com/fcatrin