See also: Initiatives/MemoryReduction and Initiatives/GnomePerformance/Sleep
Contents
Mailing list
List page for performance-list@gnome.org
Concrete problems
- Login time is too long:
/LoginTime - this is the master page for the login-time-reduction project
Evolution's mail composer takes too long to come up. See bug 666848
Unconfirmed
TODO: cleanup this list for items that are obsolete. Ask the relevant persons for a status update if needed.
- Evolution takes too long to switch between components. Cecilia González from the Women's Summer Outreach Program is looking into this.
- Tomboy startup time scales nonlinearly with the number of notes/links, or something like that (11 seconds on Federico's machine).
- GConf batched requests are not implemented. Cody Russell is working on this.
2006-2010 Ongoing work
TODO: cleanup this list for items that have been fixed. Ask around for updates from the relevant persons as needed.
Pango optimization work
Reducing the number of poll() wakeups: Ryan Lortie's project, How to debug Glib apps which do this.
Fixed-point versions of GdkPixbuf scaling functions, for platforms like ARM which don't have hardware floating point
Torture test and performance benchmark for GTK+ theme engines by Manu Cornet
Phillip Ezolt on profiling Nautilus startup for Summer of Code 2006
Cecilia González on profiling Evolution component switching for Women's Summer Outreach Program 2006
Profiling Tools
sysprof
Sysprof - a tool that helps in findind the functions in which a program uses most of its time
gprof
exmap-console
OProfile
SystemTap
Cairo trace utility (cairo-perf-trace)
Carl D. Wort blog entry
References and resources
A new feature gets added, at some performance cost. When is this worth it?
Dynamic Linux Kernel Instrumentation with SystemTap by EugeneTeo
Case study: Liferea's blog posts on performance. This can be quite informative for those who deal with databases in their application. For many years, Liferea was infamous for its performance problems related to I/O; since 1.8.3+, these problems have finally been solved.
Profiling Desktop Applications by FedericoMenaQuintero (ogg video, 258MB, in english)