Re: [Evolution-hackers] Gaim/Evolution presence integration

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 20:11 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 17:51 -0600, Irving Cordova wrote:
> > As many of you probably know, Google is sponsoring many different
> > projects with its Google's Summer of Code.
> 
> I wish they would sponsor one of those $4500 bounties to improve
> Evolution's speed, rather than worrying about memory usage.  I ended up
> having to use OE this past week, and I have to say it smokes Evo on a
> slower box (sub Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM).

As far as evolution itself is concerned, memory over-use and low
performance are connected.

But I think you'll find much of the performance is outside of the core
code.  For example I just committed a patch to gal which fixes a bug
where it would re-draw the entire list every time the cursor moved.
This one 2 line change makes a significant difference - many of the
performance issues are in rendering.  Pango, glade, and bonobo-ui are
all pretty slow, as it gtk2 in general.  These are things which are not
easily fixed, either because of poor algorithm choice or the complexity
of the problem being solved.

> Memory will just get cheaper, while slower CPUs will be around forever,
> as there are many who see Moore's law in terms of getting the same
> performance out of a smaller and quieter box, rather than making the CPU
> faster.

I suggest perhaps that a full-blown gnome desktop isn't really for them
then, at least not at this point - I find it too much overhead on a
'fast' laptop.