Re: GUADEC Hacking

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 19:09 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
>
> > yes we know its disk seeks that are causing the problem and secondly 
> > GConf is the most disk intensive service at start up and lastly due to 
> > its design of having loads of files that need to be read. Put all three 
> > together...
>
>
> I'm a little skeptical because IIRC the mail I posted with the
> gconf-on-startup profiling numbers only showed 2-3 seconds for GConf.
> Which is worth fixing, but by no means explains the entire login time.
>
> A good place to start for full data would be the "boot chart" profiles
> people have done.

But those just show the start up time of the daemons. Correct me if I'm 
wrong but its not easy tell from them how a big a hit they are causing 
after they are up and running?

What we need to know from GConfd is how often a cache miss occurs (IE 
that results or is likely to result in disk activity) whenever key 
values are requested from apps like Gnome-Panel, Nautilus and other 
services that are called later on in startup. Is it possible to 
log/extract this information? (I assume this is easy as GConfd will know 
whether the keys are in its cache or not).

Hopefully from this we will get some idea whether it really is the main 
cause of all this performance sapping disk activity.

jamie.

> Havoc