Analyzing and improving GNOME startup time

[Martin Holt Juliussen]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 12:50 +0200, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> but I do cry at how sluggish it is when running. It seems
> hopeless. Any KDE app, even though I run them within Gnome obviously, is
> significantly more responsive/snappy than its Gnome counterpart. I have
> noticed this consistently, be it for small or bigger apps. Same happens
> when I run big Windows programs (eg MS Office or Dreamweaver) in VMware.
> Basically anything runs faster than Gnome apps, even when they run
> within Gnome instead of their "native" environment, weird.

> But maybe it's the whole GTK thing that makes gnome slow ? So I guess we
> can't blame Gnome, and can only cross fingers that the GTK boys work on
> speed as well ??

After what I have understood, it's because of the Cairo backend and that
it is not optimized yet. It seems it has only gotten worse while
development of Breezy has come forward. Dragging a window over a another
is disaster compared to how it was in Hoary (I "only" got 1000MHz and
512MBs of RAM). The same problem exists with only X running (started
with startx, not using gnome-session etc., not gdm running) and started
only two GTK-windows like Epiphany and gnome-terminal. Also
gnome-terminal is slow. It's not responsive when I use ls in some
directories compared to for example xterm. I have thought about
downgrading to Hoary again for daily use.

I hope the issues about this is sorted out before 2.14, because it seems
that 2.12 isn't as usable for a little older machines as 2.10 is.

But that said, I love a lot of 2.12 improvements (but maybe more on the
application level) and I think it's interesting what Cairo can bring in
the future.


-- 
Martin Holt Juliussen <mjuliuss at online.no>