Re: Removing xrdb for 10% startup win?

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 18:09 +0200, Lorenzo Colitti wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> For my Summer of Code project (mentor: Owen Taylor) I am working on 
> improving gnome startup time. Proof-of-concept work on gconf has already 
> succeded in reducing boot time from ~35 to ~20 seconds, showing that 
> there is room for improvement.

  That's great news.

> 
> Moving down the list of top culprits, my benchmarks show that xrdb (and 
> the cpp it spawns) to be one of the worst, and indeed symlinking xrdb to 
> /bin/true results in a ~10% reduction in startup time.
> 
> xrdb is called by gnome-settings-daemon in order to make the colours of 
> X applications match the standard GTK theme and to merge in user 
> settings from .Xdefaults, .Xresources and .gnome2/xrdb/* :
> 
> http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-control-center/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-xrdb.c?rev=1.5&view=markup 
> 
> 
> I was thinking of implementing a cache for xrdb, but in discussion on 
> IRC some people also suggested that xrdb should either be turned off by 
> default (using a gconf key) or should be made less flexible, e.g. by not 
> supporting #define statements in user files. Since there's no point in 
> me implementing a cache if this code is going to get turned off anyway, 
> I'm posting this here for opinions.
> 
> The argument for removing xrdb altogether is that users that are putting 
> #define statements in .Xdefaults or .Xresources are (a) rare, (b) 
> probably non relying on gnome to call xrdb for them, and (c) savvy 
> enough to fix the problem if they are.
> 
> Thoughts? Should xrdb be turned off by default?

  IMHO a much better solution would be to simply delay running xrdb
until after the splash screen disappears.  This way people can get at
their business quicker, while xrdb runs in background.

  Regards.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic