[plug] Snappy UI

[Cameron Patrick]

Craig Ringer wrote:

| >you could actually time, but just the feel. OO.o takes six years to load
| >and I'm just not a happy camper.
| 
| OO.o's load times are very dependent on disk speed.

Yeah, and Onno mentioned he had a laptop drive too.  Every laptop I've
seen has loaded OOo much slower than most desktop machines - even when
the laptop had the faster CPU.  Conclusion: laptop drives suck.

| When memory is plentiful or other users are already 
| using OO.o, it loads in about 1 second. When it must be loaded from 
| disk, it'll take more than 5 seconds to load - on a dual Xeon with 2 
| gigs of RAM and RAID 1 / and /usr . Not cool.

I suppose that makes me feel not too bad about how long it takes to
start on my desktop :-/

| [recompiling with -Os]
| It makes a big difference with KDE on my laptop (4200rpm disk) -
| perhaps 30% faster to load, and noticably faster to run.

I would imagine that on a Celeron the reduced cache pressure would be
a big advantage.

| I'm beginning to wonder if internally compressed binaries might even be 
| faster, given that most of the time my CPU is mostly idle during boot as 
| it waits for disk access.

They probably would be.  The swsusp folks found that LZO compressed
images were faster than straight uncompressed ones; gzipped ones were slower.

| Of course, if the XServer folks ever get around to IMPLEMENTING 
| ACCELERATED XRENDER SUPPORT - or even optimising XRENDER - that'll help 
| a lot, too. As it is, I find my home desktop (with NVidia drivers and 
| XRENDER accel enabled) astonishingly snappy.

A while ago I read something by Keith Packard (?? I think... the
RENDER guy, anyway) suggesting that the current software RENDER
implementation is about as lousy as they come and has a lot of room
for improvement, it's just that no-one has done it yet.

I want RENDER acceleration on my Radeon - drawing antialiased text
just shouldn't slow a 2GHz+ machine to a crawl.

| Another thing that helps is, oddly enough, the latest KDE. I find it 
| very zippy in comparison to older versions. Of course, that fails the 
| "not compiling things" test.

No it doesn't.  packages.debian.org/kdebase says testing has kde 3.2.2-1.

| Finally, I think you'll find that the GNOME and KDE folks are now 
| starting to pay attention to the bloat issue. Both frameworks are in a 
| fairly stable phase (KDE more so than GNOME, it seems) with more 
| attention being paid to polish and speed rather than just getting it 
| working properly. The KDE 3.3 release certainly suggests that this shift 
| is having a real effect.

KDE 3.3 released?  You been borrowing Shayne's time machine again? :-P
KDE 3.1 was smaller and faster than 2.2.  KDE 3.2 is faster again.

Cameron.