[OLPC-devel] Re: pygtk performance issue

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

>
> There was also the issue that Mike Heam brought up about the linking 
> overhead of importing _gtk.so in particular.  Here I must profess that 
> I am largely ignorant of the issues, but I'll speculate anyway.  
> Perhaps just splitting up _gtk.so into separate modules would be 
> helpful, particularly if there are really different kinds of 
> functionality so that some might never be needed by an application 
> (just switching to lazy imports only stretches out the performance 
> problem, and I'm not sure that's a good solution here).  But even 
> then, the memory overhead is quite substantial (8Mb?) so his 
> suggestion to fork an already-gtk-initialized Python process might be 
> the only way to address both issues reliably.  (My own intuition is 
> that PyGTK is representing every GTK object with a corresponding 
> Python object, which causes a duplication that may not be necessary, 
> but even if that is true it's part of the basic architecture of PyGTK 
> so it's not going to be easy to change).
>
>
That's basically what maemo-launcher does... for more details:

http://maemo.org/lxr/source/maemo-launcher/README

I tend to think we should do both. Write something similar for python 
but also improve gtk/pygtk startup performance (so that at some point 
the hack will not be necessary anymore).

Marco