Re: To Discuss: Application Startup Time

[Sridhar R <sridharinfinity yahoo com>]

On Tue, Fabio Gomes wrote:
> 
> 	Is there any past work related to optimizing the
> startup time of GNOME
> applications?
> 
> 	Why does Emacs, a complex scriptable beast, start
> faster than GEdit,
> the (supposed to be) lightweight text editor?
> 
> 	What are the main bottlenecks of application
> startup in GNOME? I see
> that when GNOME 2.0 was released, some new
> technologies such as
> client-side fonts raised the startup time
> significantly when compared to
> 1.x applications. 
> 
> 	I would like to bring up a discussion on how we
> could make GNOME
> applications start faster, at hacker level and user
> level.
> 
> 	Any toughts?	

   Well. I am now a GNOME hacker.  I really don't know
what makes GNOME/GTK+ apps to start slower.  For GNOME
apps, the delay is (might be) in gnome_program_init
function.  Any application needs to initialize some
data, and it takes time.  Why can't we bring some
precomputation here.  Any GNOME application will be in
same state when started (i.e. each calls
gnome_progra_init and most of the part of that
function is common for all applications).  So may be
one can initialize the datastructues and keep it ready
in some location, so that upcoming apps, can use this
precomputed stuffs for faster startup.

  Also the issue is with X architecture.  Being
non-monolithic, it's really difficult to expect some
quick responses in GUI (although Linux is faster, the
GUI is still slower.  This is exactly (pair-)opposite
in the Windows world)


=====
"How do you power off this machine?" (Linus, when upgrading linux.cs.helsinki.fi, and after using the machine for several months.) 
---
Sridhar R 
Email: r_sridhar xATx users xDOTx sf xDOTx net
WWW:   http://sridhar.has.it
Blog:  http://sridhar.blog-city.com/

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