Re: Removing xrdb for 10% startup win?

[JustFillBug <mozbugbox yahoo com au>]

On 2005-08-28, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
>
> Since it looks like the main expense of Xrdb is paging the gcc binary
> into memory, calling it twice is not a lot more expensive than
> calling it once.=20
>
> cpp is built into GCC these days, so is not lightweight by any means.
>
> I don't know if there is a 10k cpp implementation out there, but if
> there is, then switching X.org to use that might by the right course in
> this area.
>
> To put it another way - we don't get the win by just removing
> grdb, we need to get rid of xrdb calling cpp altogether.
>

Yes, I cannot believe calling xrdb in gnome will cause so much time.
Anyway, since xrdb was written like years ago, I believe a better
rewrite on xrdb will solve the problem without much ill side effect.
It's not like the x resource format is so hard to parse in the view of
modern programming. 

How much IO operation can a new xrdb program (Maybe with 0 line of
actual x resource) cause comparing to all the other programms which will
be run at gnome startup? 10% is just too much. Maybe a grdb should be
implmented and user can opt to call grdb in their Xinit script and by
gnome too.