Idea for xxxxx.desktop access performance improvement

[Leslie S Satenstein <lsatenstein yahoo com>]

Background

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I have roughly 120 applications installed with Fedora 28 Beta.  For each application, there exists a xxxxxx.desktop file.   From what I noted,

when the user clicks on a desktop icon, there is a search through the /usr/share/applications followed by a search through  $HOME/.config/autostart and

$HOME/.local/share/applications. There is also a small cache of recently used names (favourites).

Each xxxxx.desktop has an associated icon.  Each xxxxxx.desktop has provisions for multi-language support.

I believe that there is an opportunity to do some performance tuning here, in a similar way to "compiled xml lookup schemas".  (refer to /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas)

IDEA Proposal

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For a unilingual environment, it is also possible to scan each   xxxxxxx.desktop and remove unused names and comments, shrinking each xxxxxx.desktop size substantially

Each xxxx.desktop file has therein the name of an icon.  I do not know enough about this area of desktop file management, but if the icon names were hashed,

and registered in a hash-table, or binary search table, some application launching could be done quickly and with less overhead.  The overhead would be spent maintaining

the hash/binSearch table at time of add or removal of an application.

 

Regards

 Leslie

Leslie Satenstein

Montréal Québec, Canada

PS. I have done something similar with a binary search of a "sequenced table of hashes" containing around 250 entries. A lookup took no more than 8 probes. (2**8)=256