RFC: startup time - again

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 10:50:02AM +0100 I heard the voice of
Russel Winder, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> I don't have anything concrete to contribute to the core of this
> issue, I would just say that for the average user a startup time <
> 0.5s is probably in the noise: if the startup time was 2s then there
> would be an issue but < 0.5s is likely no problem.

I would heartily disagree.  It's not the operation that takes 10
minutes and should take one that drives you up a wall; it's the one
that should have returned before you could be ready to type the next
command and makes you wait half a second.

Half a second is a *LONG* time.  Tried working across a 500ms latency
connection?  It's almost impossible.  Even 250ms is painful.  A
half-second command is one I have to wait for.  If I have to wait for
something, I'm going to do it a LOT less often[0], and I'm going to be
a lot less happy when I do it.

'bzr stat' should be something I bang out and scan the result for
unexpected stuff with my eyes while I'm typing the next command with
my hands.  But it's not.  It's something I type, start to think about
the next thing, then stop and wait for it to finish.

To borrow from somebody in some bzr perf discussion I saw reference a
month or two ago (can't remember where), try adding the equivalent of:

    alias ls 'sleep .5 ; ls'
    alias cd 'sleep .5 ; cd'
    [...]

to your shell config and work with it for a while.  It doesn't prevent
you from doing anything.  And it's only a half second; you're going to
spend more than that long understanding the output of ls.  But it's
still going to make you flat screaming *MISERABLE*.





[0] I'm always a little sad when a project grows enough revs (and it's
    not all that many) that 'bzr check' takes longer than about 30
    seconds, because I know that at that point it's almost never going
    to be run again.



-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.