Auto-launching of applications

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Steve Langasek wrote:
> Minor nit here; in the past update-notifier has always been present and
> running in the background, displaying an icon as needed.  update-notifier
> takes up about 20MB of memory on my amd64 system to fulfill this function.
> The new behavior launches update-manager, which is a much more involved
> program that takes up over 100MB when it's launched.  I know this is small
> potatoes compared to, say, firefox, but I think we should be aware of these
> costs since in aggregate they can certainly be an issue.
I don't think this is a minor nit, it's an important point, and one we
should be more conscious of when designing the new pieces we want to
deliver as part of the "Ayatana" desktop experience program.

Consumer users may not be very aware of things like RAM usage, but they
are definitely aware of "responsiveness". We should think very carefully
about how to:

 - design for effective CPU and RAM utilisation
 - design for effective click-and-keyboard responsiveness

In this case, there are definitely things we can do which would improve
both, and there are also things we can do which ensure that we only pay
the price the user *wants* to pay, *when* they want to pay it. For
example, deferring heavy lifting and parsing until we know the user
actually wants to proceed. We should also go to great pains to be able
to draw the screen as fast as possible so that users can start to
consider their response.

I very much want the work that comes from this initiative to be
*stylish*, *fast* and *robust*, so any suggestions you have for the
engineering team on the latter will be taken seriously, especially if
they come with patches! We will have full test suites to address the
latter point.

So, thanks for raising the point, and I'll ask both the DX Engineering
and the DX Design teams to test their ideas and their code against this
standard.

For 9.04, we'll pick some low-hanging fruit - nicing and io-nicing the
process, and perhaps some others. For 9.10 we can improve this
significantly.

Mark

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