Gnome optimizations and some numbers

[William Lovaton <walovaton yahoo com mx>]

Hi,

Following the recent introductory article from Callum McKenzie about
Gnome optimization techniques.

   [] http://developer.gnome.org/doc/guides/optimisation/intro.html

I would like to point to some interesting documents written by Ulrich
Drepper about shared libraries, linkers and optimizations regarding
start up times.

   [] http://people.redhat.com/drepper/

Specially these ones:

   [] http://people.redhat.com/drepper/dsohowto.pdf (updated Jan 22)
   [] http://people.redhat.com/drepper/optimtut1.ps.gz
   [] http://people.redhat.com/drepper/optimtut2.ps.gz

I have been reading them and I think they are very useful and aligned
with the goals of the recently created optimization section in d.g.o by
Callum.  May be there should be an "External Resources" link.

Finally, I would like to congratulate the GTK+ and Gnome developers for
the good results in performance improvements for the 2.10 release.  I
believe that optimizations should be done in a progressive manner in
every major release like Gnome have been doing them.  It is pretty
annoying when people want all this issues addressed in a month.

I have tested the latest Live CD from Ubuntu (Hoary) with Gnome 2.9.91
and I have to say that it is pretty fast, even with the delay from the
CD-ROM.  I'm mostly a Fedora Core user (FC3) with Gnome 2.8 and in
general I'm satisfied with the performance.

I straced some programs in both versions of Gnome and counted the number
of calls to the open() syscall. I got interesting results:

- gedit-2.8: 2700
- gedit-2.9: 780

- evolution-2.0: 3580
- evolution-2.1: 1300

I don't know for sure if these numbers are meaningful but I recall
Robert Love complaining about the huge number of open() syscalls in a
simple program like gedit.

Have a nice day,


-William