GNOME startup time: gconf tree merging

[Denis Washington <dwashington gmx net>]

Hello,

While informing myself about ways to reduce GNOME's startup time, I 
found a site named "Analyzing and Improving GNOME Startup Time" on 
gnome.org [1]. Among other things, it talks about the possibility of 
merging together the several gconf xml files to bigger trees, which 
seems to dramatically reduce startup time. As stated in the text, a 
patch for this was commited, but quickly reverted in 2004 because of 
legacy support issues [2].

My question: is the big amount of small XML files still as much of a 
problem in the current gconf version as in 2004? And if yes, are the 
reasons for which it was rejected still legitimate today? The problems 
arised with GNOME versions >2.6 which want to use the same database; 
we're at version 2.18 now....

I think if it still brings significant startup time reductions, we 
should seriously consider to get this patch into GNOME 2.20.

Regards,
Denis

[1] http://www.gnome.org/~lcolitti/gnome-startup/analysis/
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138498