XO-1(.75)

[Daniel Drake]

On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 2:53 AM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
> No inconsistency here.
> Most of the activities you see slower were ported to Gtk3.
> Tam-tam suit, speak, calculate, turtle art, maze, moon, record were not
> ported
> scratch and etoys are not related with Gtk
> Browse received a lot of care this months.
> Sadly, while the port to Gtk3 and dynamic bindings promised faster start up
> time (in theory)
> that was never true. Dsd found performance problems and pushed changes
> upstream.
> and 13.2.0 is better than 13.1.0, but anyway more work is needed.
> Maybe some work can be done in the activities to improve it.
> Do you have numbers to share?

Yes, this is the interesting point in this thread. If you take an
"old" release, on any platforms where we have "old" releases
available, and do a side-by-side comparison with the latest release,
we may well have a performance regression.

However the possible performance regression is not documented in
technical terms. People have mentioned a slowdown in previous threads,
but nobody posted any numbers. Last time, a video was posted, but that
link is no longer working and I'm not sure if it had numbers in it.

Last time it was discussed I did generate numbers myself and then
solved the problem. However that discussion was focused around Sugar
startup time. This discussion now turns to activity startup time.

So, having someone generate activity startup time numbers in a fair
test (i.e. same platform, different software versions) would be of
value.

If there is a performance regression here, we don't have a technical
diagnosis that I know of. It seems like some people suspect
GTK3/gobject-introspection as the cause, and those may be likely
candidates, but I don't think we have real diagnosis supporting that
(yet), nor any explanation for why those new technologies might be
slower than the old ones.

Daniel