Re: New Control Centre

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 21:19 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> El mar, 06-02-2007 a las 12:52 +1100, Russell Shaw escribió:
> 
> > If profiling has to be done to make a menu faster, it is pretty obvious
> > the system it is built on is stupidly inefficient and broken, especially
> > if said menu is slow on a 10 year old pc.
> 
> Ah, bingo.
> 
> Almost 10 years ago, when GNOME started, we had like three apps we
> wanted to put in the menus.  So, reading .desktop files from disk didn't
> seem like a bad idea.
> 
> Now that we have hundreds of .desktop files, it is not a good idea
> anymore to have them scattered all around the disk.  You are absolutely
> right; the system it is built on is stupidly inefficient and broken!

Yes and its fairly easily fixed with tracker once I add .desktop file
indexing to it

tracker's db is a single file so if it caches all the desktop files so
it does not have the disk seek penalty ergo all relevant desktop files
could be pulled from it very quickly. Even better is the fact that
individual categories can be queried straight from the db so no need to
hold everything in memory

secondly on systems with spare memory, its db will be in the disk cache
and therefore will be as fast as holding it in memory but without the
need to waste any (thats why using a db like sqlite is so much smarter -
sql is massively more productive to work with and performs tons faster
than parsing text files)


jamie.