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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Speed issues on app load
From:       rik () kde ! org
Date:       2000-12-20 22:36:56
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#if Waldo Bastian
> On Wednesday 20 December 2000 12:43, rik@kde.org wrote:
> > Observations on app loading speed:
> >
> > * It takes 700ms to load and map a window with the most simple KDE
> > application possible.
> >
> > * It takes 10s to load and map konsole when it hasn't been used for a
> >   while.
> >
> > * It takes 2s to load and map konsole when it's just been used.
> >
> > The real problem here is the 10s loading for apps that haven't been
> > used for a while. It's just silly.
> 
> Is this from the command line or through kdeinit? If you use strace -tt you 
> can get get a better overview of which sections of the start sequence take 
> how much time. It makes no sense to look at the lib loading part because we 
> can't change that and we have kdeinit to circumvent it.

Yes, I used strace's timing facilities. 
Anyway, as you say, kdeinit helps a lot here...

> That leaves the other stuff. My guess is that a large amount of the time is 
> spent on disk-seeks. That's more or less directly proportional to the amount 
> of files being opened. So grep for open calls and see what you get.
>
> Disk-seeks are sort of horrible because the transfer rate of your disk has 
> improved over the years but seek-times remain pretty much the same. 

According to my vmstat output, very little disk i/o when app was not
recently used, none when opening again immediately afterwards.

No blocks read, 64 blocks written. That's 64kB on Linux. Yes,
there might have been several seeks involved, but 7s worth ? Anyway,
the first 62 of these blocks were written within the first second
after I typed 'keditbookmarks\n'.

Of course, keditbookmarks is usually started by kdeinit, so that
should fix it. But I still get apps starting slowly when they haven't
been used for a while. And that is when I start them from kicker,
so they're created by kdeinit. Argh. Something to figure out at
the weekend, I think.

> Opening 1600 fonts will kill any hope for a reasonable performance.

Yes. I deleted them. I think I need to install a font server ;)

Rik

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