Trying to reduce our memory and battery footprint

[Ted Gould]

On Wed, 2012-10-17 at 06:43 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
<snip>
> I don't think the reason why starting Unity and starting the
> Dash takes so long is in any way related to startup order or that we
> wouldn't have a mechanism of starting things on demand (D-Bus
> activation works just fine for the most part).

To be clear, I don't think that using upstart will materially effect the
startup time of Unity or the desktop in general.  There might be slight
gains through clearer dependencies, but I don't think that's a reason to
do it.  I think you've pointed out some real issues there, but those are
probably independent threads themselves.

> One opportunity where having session upstart (or systemd, FWIW) jobs
> would be handy is to finally replace update-notifier. It's become a
> collection of totally unrelated things (launching update-manager,
> launching Apport on crashes, launching Jockey on missing firmware,
> etc) just because we always need a session daemon to listen for
> events. This could be replaced by individual jobs that are triggered
> by uevents and inotify watches. This will help maintainability and
> improve memory usage a bit (2.5 MB RSS for upstart vs. 13 MB RSS
> update-notifier), and shouldn't noticeably increase CPU overhead.

I think that this is the key benefit, and I think it happens in other
places other than update-notifier.  I think we need a way to remove the
need for many of the long running services that we have in the desktop.

		--Ted

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