[Trac #741] Activity startup is slow

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#741: Activity startup is slow
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 Reporter:  tomeu        |       Owner:  cjb      
     Type:  defect       |      Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:  Untriaged
Component:  performance  |    Keywords:           
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 The donut icon pulsing part of startup notification is causing the
 activity startup to be much slower than before.

 The web activity now lasts about 25s. to start, if I disable the pulsing
 it gets to 11s. This also happens in the other activities, as pygtk
 loading is cpu intensive and it now has to compete for the cpu with the
 icon animation (pulsing).

 I have changed the sugar code for the animation so it caches every buffer
 in the animation, but startup time has not improved. This is because the
 cpu time consumed is in X when updating the buffer, not in the animation
 code in sugar.

 So I have done this little activity for testing animation performance in
 cairo/X and have managed to put it to 20 FPS with the python process being
 almost idle (as it caches the cairo buffer for every frame) and X taking
 most of the CPU time.

 Also attached is a sysprof profiling result of the activity running in a
 b1 machine.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/741>
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