Re: SoC idea: desktop file cache

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> After reading Alan's and David's comment it occurs to me that it could
> be way simpler to have a dbus-service handling the desktop files and
> anybody wanting to access the desktop files in a fast way can use that
> service (through a library wrapper).

I don't think that would make things faster; in fact it'd be more
likely to make them slower.  DBus is just not designed for bulk data
transfer.  Think about it - the bus daemon sits in the middle, copying
strings around etc., have to be read in and out...

One thing that we should probably promote more about GNOME 3 is how
far we are long in kicking GConf out, which had this
single-threaded-centralized-daemon model.  When I was doing some
profiling a while back, I was surprised by the extent to which gconfd
acted as a serialization point for the entire desktop, especially if
you didn't use PRELOAD_RECURSIVE for reading keys.
dconf is just way better.