Improving Nautilus startup time

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

Hi,

I'm doing some work to improve GNOME login time.  I'm starting with the
user-visible pieces first, Nautilus and gnome-panel.  

I wrote a little program to extract a timeline of Nautilus's startup
from an strace log.  The first timeline is here:

http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2006-03.html#login-time-1

The big white gaps on the left of the chart are where Nautilus does a
time-consuming process during initialization.  The bottom of the chart
is where Nautilus finally paints the desktop.

I think it would be pretty productive if each of a few people would grab
one of these gaps, and tweak the hell out of it to make it shorter.

I'm currently looking at improving the startup time of gnome-vfs-daemon.
I suspect that this is actually the big delay we see when activating any
bonobo server (i.e. the reason why gedit and gnome-terminal start much
slower than, say, gnome-calculator).

Help would be much appreciated :)

Thanks,

  Federico