Re: doesn't the session splash disappear too soon?

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le mercredi 04 avril 2007 à 10:33 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero a
écrit :
> El mié, 04-04-2007 a las 10:59 +0200, Frederic Crozat escribió:
> > Le mercredi 04 avril 2007 à 09:31 +0100, Thomas Wood a écrit :
> > > Ugh, can't we get rid of the splash screen yet?
> > 
> > I don't think it is a good idea : a lot of people don't have fast as
> > light systems which give you a working desktop 2s after typing your
> > password.
> 
> We've been reducing the time it takes to log in with good results.  We
> can definitely make login happen in 2 seconds; it's just about finding
> the slow parts and fixing them.

Well, you need to define your test system first for those 2 seconds :)

I just did some very unscientific measures on my test system (PIII
750Mhz), with a warm start (all files in kernel cache, since this PC has
already a very slow IO system) :

-with no program started except nautilus, gnome-panel and metacity, it
takes 12s from login to get the system ready to respond
 
-when adding beagle in the startup process, you go up to 15s

-if I add the various programs we starts by default on Mandriva
(gnome-volume-manager, gnome-power-manager, net_applet, etc), I go up to
31s before seeing nautilus desktop and 45s to get gnome-panel
responsive.

Maybe we need a way to defer launch of most autostarted applications
after desktop is ready (ie metacity / gnome-panel and nautilus are
ready).

> Remember that we initially added the splash screen as a band-aid for our
> horribly slow login times :)
> 
> Pending things:
> 
> - Find why Nautilus takes between 1 and 2 seconds to paint the desktop
> after it hits gtk_main().

Agreed, you can clearly see the time between nautilus being started and
painting full desktop.

> - Instrument gnome-panel and plot some timelines to see what the slow
> parts are.  When we did this for Nautilus, we were able to solve every
> single problem except for the one described above.

One thing blocking gnome-panel is usually applets startup (try adding
deskbar-applet).

> - Cooperate with distros so that they all include the proper
> preload/readahead tools; make sure they do preloading at the right time.

readahead is only useful for cold system and it doesn't "scale" as
soon as users starts to customize their system. It is nice for a distro 
to show "look how fast your distro boots" but for multi-users system where
use different applications choices, you're dead, unless you lower apps being preloaded
using readhead. I think bedhad did some researchs on using learning readhead based 
on user activity but they were inconclusive.

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva