10s to boot. 2s to redraw a Thunderbird or Firefox window on a thin client

Posted Jun 11, 2009 14:06 UTC (Thu) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
Parent article: Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

So, I'll be able to boot up in 10s. Great.

What's not so great is that it takes a full 20% of that time every time Firefox or Thunderbird (Fedora 10) just redraws its window on my thin client. This is without app processing of any kind. Just wave an xterm in front of it and watch the graphics huffing and puffing for 2-3s to get things back to exactly how they were. It seems to be proportional to the number of widgets, Dia is even more dire. Somehow this doesn't seem like progress.

Doing an "xdpyinfo" on a thin client (a SunRay 1) showed that the X server had the following extensions:
AccessX Adobe-DPS-Extension DAMAGE DOUBLE-BUFFER DPMS DPSExtension Extended-Visual-Information FBPM GLX LBX
MIT-SCREEN-SAVER MIT-SHM MIT-SUNDRY-NONSTANDARD Multi-Buffering
RECORD SECURITY SHAPE
SUN_ALLPLANES SUN_DGA SUN_OVL SUN_SME SYNC SolarisIA TOG-CUP
X-Resource XC-APPGROUP XC-MISC XEVIE XFIXES XIE
XInputDeviceEvents XInputExtension XTEST

Emacs refreshes instantly, Tcl/Tk apps refresh instantly, Gnome apps and Ooo are dog slow. It would be illuminating to know where all that time is actually going. Anyone know?

10s to boot. 2s to redraw a Thunderbird or Firefox window on a thin client

Posted Jun 11, 2009 14:39 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]

I would guess the RENDER extension is the key one you're missing.