performance work (was re: Re: Sugar & XFCE)

[Greg Smith]

Hi Neil,

I couldn't resist replying after I saw your reference to Geoworks. I've 
never seen any other references to that elegant "shell"!

In terms of performance, unfortunately its not one of the top four items 
for release 9.1.0. That said it is a pet peeve of mine and a serious 
concern for deployments. I want to make some progress in 9.1.0 if we can.

Three ideas on how you can help.

1 - There is a recent thread on SVG performance. See: 
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010200.html

You may find something there you can contribute to.

2 - I also get the impression we do need to work on the Cairo front. If 
you can list a set of bugs, we can flag them as useful for 9.1 and track 
them.

3 - John's list of suggestions looks helpful too.

I put forward a basic requirements definition on performance here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Performance

That page is locked briefly while I move it to Semantic Wiki format. 
That should be done by Friday.

Starting next week, anyone can update the specifications section with 
URLs to code or design suggestions and other work. That should help us 
get synchronized and moving in the same direction.

Comments on the requirements welcome too. Considering that everyone 
knows the GUI is "slow" it was surprisingly hard to write!

You want to help and we need your help. Let me know what I can do to 
make it happen.

Thanks,

Greg S

*****************
Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:58:26 +1300 From: Neil Graham 
<Lerc at screamingduck.com> Subject: Re: Sugar & XFCE To: 
devel at lists.laptop.org Message-ID: <1228525106.6670.21.camel at squishy> 
Content-Type: text/plain On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 19:37 +0800, Carlos 
Nazareno wrote:
 > > These days, 433MHz may seem unusable to the average Moore's
 > > law-spoiled user, but it was more than enough for me who grew up on a
 > > 4.77MHz 8088 as a kid (yeah, that's nothing to you guys over here who
 > > are older :P), a Pentium 166 MMX with 64MB RAM in college during the
 > > late 90s, and then an AMD K6-2 500 w/ 256MB RAM as my primary
 > > workstation during the early 2000's.
 > >
 > > That K6-2 500 w/ 256MB RAM's specs are practically the same as the
 > > XO's and performs more or less the same as proven by this circa 2003
 > > experiment of mine: http://www.object404.com/lab/aquarium.php -- it
 > > runs at practically the same speed on the XO as my aforementioned K6-2
 > > Win98 rig


That doesn't change the fact that using the XO is like walking neck deep
in treacle.

I absolutely agree that the machine is up to doing good performance.  It
dismays me to see things like the scrolling of a static web page in
browse can't keep up with keypresses.  The real problem there is it's
hard to isolate the slowness, I think largely due to the fact that the
problems aren't isolated.

Is there any central repository for information about where the speed is
going?

I'd like to help out here, and I've tried, but it has been very
difficult.  When looking at things I have encountered things like "Why
don't you use [thing], that should do it the best way" only to find
[thing] needs help from an experienced [thing] hacker to work
efficiently in this case.

Much of the time [thing] has been cairo or X. but I think that's only
because of the areas I've tried to work.

I'm still reminded of using GEOworks Ensemble on a 286. It could do so
much with so little and the XO seems to do so little with so much more.

Not blaming anyone in particular, but I've been trying to work on this
stuff and I have to vent my frustration every six months or so.