9.1 Proposal: Top five performance problems

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 10:10 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>> Marco,
>>
>> I did some basic profiling of my new rainbow code last night and
>> discovered that, in the best case with the current codebase on XO, it
>> costs about 0.5s/"1 exec(python)". Approximately 80% of the 0.5s was
>> spent importing modules.
>>
>> I hope to dig deeper in the near future, but I am concerned at my lack
>> of inspiration about how to deal with this problem. (Other than by
>> rewriting into a different language.) I still do not consider the
>> mod_python approach used in the 767-era rainbow to be a viable long-term
>> solution.
>>
>
> FWIW, I had done some experiments with Federico's profiling scripts in
> the early stages of the 8.2 cycle, and had got similar results:
> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/not_so_prettygraph.png
> It's not much meaningful, but if it helps in any way.. :-)
> -sdg-

Hmm, just did some measurements on a recent joyride image running a
recent snapshot of sugar's HEAD and got this numbers:

1224870285                                                 Roughly
when ck-xinit-session would be called
1224870288.762430 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Starting the shell
1224870297.765248 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the desktop window
1224870297.777485 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the home view
1224870297.780084 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the favorites view
1224870297.793263 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the activities list
1224870298.559094 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the group view
1224870298.631829 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the mesh view
1224870299.444656 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the bundle registry
1224870301.935619 DEBUG root: STARTUP: --- uisetup_completed_cb ---
1224870301.979451 DEBUG root: STARTUP: --- uisetup_delayed_cb ---
1224870303.197090 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the frame
1224870305.001450 DEBUG root: STARTUP: Loading the journal

So that's 20 seconds that can (quite roughly) be compared to the 72
seconds you got.

I don't think we really got a 52 seconds improvement, but I'm pretty
sure that Sugar already got quite leaner (measured 15MB of mem less
after booting) and faster and there's still plenty of room for
improvement.

Cannot wait to have F10 joyride images to compare 8.2 to something
closer to what will ship in 9.1 ;)

Regards,

Tomeu