It's the CPU too...

Posted Aug 6, 2005 18:22 UTC (Sat) by rlrevell (guest, #23596)
Parent article: Our bloat problem

Whenever Linux desktop bloat comes up everyone wants to talk about memory wastage. But I think excessive CPU suckage is just as bad of a problem.

Recently I found a horrible performance bug in Evolution where it repeatedly goes over every message header with an empty search pattern if the message search bar is empty (rather than short circuiting the entire search process).

I distributed my quick hack solution to a few people on LKML and most people said it made browsing their mail 10x faster.

Unfortunately it took weeks and much flamage for me to even convince the Evolution developers that there was a bug, because their machines are all so fast that the performance problem was imperceptible.

Compare this to the Windows XP desktop which sucks just as much memory, but is SNAPPY on a sub-GHz machine.

Another example, on my slow (600MHz) machine, I didn't even realize OO *had* right click menus, because after right clicking in the document they take about 3 seconds to appear. It feels like OO is generating the context menu from some XML template or something and then popping it up AFTER the right click is received. Completely unusable. Compare Windows, which has obviously generated, rendered and cached these menus and just has to blit them in from offscreen when the user right clicks (instantaneous).

Memory isn't the problem, people. We're wasting WAY too many CPU cycles on bullshit.