GNOME 2.18 released [LWN.net]

GNOME 2.18 released

Posted Mar 15, 2007 2:48 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467)
In reply to: GNOME 2.18 released by madscientist
Parent article: GNOME 2.18 released

"... although I hardly think many Gnome users' lives will be greatly improved by increasing the speed of "gconf --makefile-install-rule" (indeed, I don't even have the gconf program installed on my Ubuntu system)."

You might be surprised. gconftool was the chief reason my computer spent over 4 hours upgrading from Ubuntu 6.04 to Ubuntu 6.10*. As for Yelp, it starts more slowly than Firefox, which is really saying something. But my main complaint with it is that it sometimes just runs in a loop eating all CPU, hence unbounded runtime.

Like you, I'm pretty happy with GNOME. You don't see me rushing off to work on gconf or anything like that.

* The other reason was the repeated use of gzip -9 to build the initrd, an operation which takes over 140 seconds on my computer.

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GNOME 2.18 released

Posted Mar 15, 2007 3:47 UTC (Thu) by Sutoka (guest, #43890) [Link] (2 responses)

I may be incorrect, but doesn't yelp use the gecko rendering engine, so it
REQUIRES Firefox as a dependency and pretty much embeds firefox? That
would explain why it would start slower than firefox.

GNOME 2.18 released

Posted Mar 15, 2007 6:47 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

It uses libxul these days (not sure if ever did differently) to access xul and gecko. At least in my personal experience, some browsers which embed gecko start faster than firefox, so I don't think the layer cake explains things alone.

GNOME 2.18 released

Posted Mar 16, 2007 7:29 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I doubt it has anything to do with Gecko or Firefox or anything like that.

I would expect that the problem is I/O related and maybe have to do with XML-based formats.

I would expect that yelp is banging all over your harddrive looking for thousands of little XML files or html files or something like that. Polling this or that directory and trying to build a index of aviable help pages.

I haven't looked at it, but this is generaly why things slow down in Gnome. To many little text files and to many places were they could be and are checked.

Often checked and rechecked and rechecked and rechecked again as application developers often use parts of gnome lib stuff they don't quit 'get'. Or is triggering some hidden functionality that make those lib files are doing something which he didn't nessicarially want.

Also for the other person which had the problem with Ubuntu taking four hours on gconf or something bizzare like that.

I use Gnome on Debian unstable so I regularly get this or that update and I never had anything like that happen with me. Not remotely. So I'm willing to bet that it's something that Ubuntu did to Gnome, not nessicarially something that Gnome did.

There are a few things that Ubuntu does which does odd performance-reducing things.

I noticed that when running 'pure' gnome, as it's designed by the Gnome folks (basicly _no_ firefox, for example. _no_ openoffice.org for another example, but instead epiphany and gnome office) then it's not bad at all.