“The time it takes to log in to GNOME has not improved much in recent years and does not compare favourably with other systems, especially closed-source systems. This work attempts to determine what causes GNOME startup to be slow and what can be done to address the problem.”
Everyone is trying to pull up Gnome’s socks in terms of startup time and performance, which is really great.
Also see Nat’s blog about his idea of replacing the gnome startup script. Lots of good info on planet.gnome.org for those that are interested.
Looking forward to Gnome 2.14
Analyzing and improving GNOME startup time is of course a fine thing to do but imo fixing all the issues inside GNOME should be much more of a priority than anything else. I think a few developers should start seeing the applications and the desktop as a whole and fix the half working stuff first. Different Toolbars are still an issue, not behaving to the ‘Toolbars & Menus’ capplet is an issue, having the applications permanently crash or not work correctly is an issue, having stuff like Evolution permanently trash the sync files including startup crashes, duplicate email entries and other things (in 3.4.0 release) should be addressed, making Nautilus become usable should be a priority thing, the logout lockup or freeze (for minutes) should be addressed and fixed (session manager). Make GStreamer work seamlessly with GNOME should be an priority thing and and and, the list can be expanded in so many areas which makes me wonder sometimes how people can get serious work done with GNOME. Take a look over to KDE for example, they are of course not perfect either but their list of true annoyances are at an minimum and permanent development and improvement addresses issues so they get fixed really fast. GNOME is a never ending pit full of issues which should be addressed. At it’s current state it never surpasses Windows 95 or any other Windows version nor is it in any competition with MacOSX or anything else.
I couldn’t have said it better.
and no patches. Typical Gnome style.
You didn’t even read the article. Did you?
Analyzing and improving GNOME startup time is of course a fine thing to do but imo fixing all the issues inside GNOME should be much more of a priority than anything else. I think a few developers should start seeing the applications and the desktop as a whole and fix the half working stuff first. Different Toolbars are still an issue, not behaving to the ‘Toolbars & Menus’ capplet is an issue, having the applications permanently crash or not work correctly is an issue, having stuff like Evolution permanently trash the sync files including startup crashes, duplicate email entries and other things (in 3.4.0 release) should be addressed, making Nautilus become usable should be a priority thing, the logout lockup or freeze (for minutes) should be addressed and fixed (session manager). Make GStreamer work seamlessly with GNOME should be an priority thing and and and, the list can be expanded in so many areas which makes me wonder sometimes how people can get serious work done with GNOME. Take a look over to KDE for example, they are of course not perfect either but their list of true annoyances are at an minimum and permanent development and improvement addresses issues so they get fixed really fast. GNOME is a never ending pit full of issues which should be addressed. At it’s current state it never surpasses Windows 95 or any other Windows version nor is it in any competition with MacOSX or anything else.
Analyzing and improving GNOME startup time is of course a fine thing to do but imo fixing all the issues inside GNOME should be much more of a priority than anything else. I think a few developers should start seeing the applications and the desktop as a whole and fix the half working stuff first. Different Toolbars are still an issue, not behaving to the ‘Toolbars & Menus’ capplet is an issue, having the applications permanently crash or not work correctly is an issue, having stuff like Evolution permanently trash the sync files including startup crashes, duplicate email entries and other things (in 3.4.0 release) should be addressed, making Nautilus become usable should be a priority thing, the logout lockup or freeze (for minutes) should be addressed and fixed (session manager). Make GStreamer work seamlessly with GNOME should be an priority thing and and and, the list can be expanded in so many areas which makes me wonder sometimes how people can get serious work done with GNOME. Take a look over to KDE for example, they are of course not perfect either but their list of true annoyances are at an minimum and permanent development and improvement addresses issues so they get fixed really fast. GNOME is a never ending pit full of issues which should be addressed. At it’s current state it never surpasses Windows 95 or any other Windows version nor is it in any competition with MacOSX or anything else.
Eugenia, we would appreciate it if you stop abusing your powers by deleting comments that you dislike.
i fully agree with you.
Gnome right now is only a big mess full of developers who don’t understand nothing about the real need of users.
whitout firefox openoffice and thunderbird Gnome would have value near to $0 cents.
Is it Trolls Day today?
Why can’t we have a single thread about Gnome without a crowd of troll repeating obsessively the same old crappy comments on how gnome sucks?
You don’t like Gnome? then don’t use Gnome and don’t vex us with this pile of crappy comments.
Over all, I think Gnome has steadily improved over time.
and has gotten more stable. both GTK and Gnome are both looking at performence issues, and if both camps improve just a little, then you will see a noticeable impact.
-Nex6
-nex6.blogspot.com
http://nat.org/2005/october/#Keep-It-Simple-Stupid
is The link I belive someone above mentions, and nat greatly improved start up time with this script. so expect to see gnome with much faster start up times in the future.
combining this with other perforcmence stuff and the GTK, performence stuff, stuff help gnome greatl;y.
-Nex6
-nex6.blogspot.com
Ali, don’t blame Eugenia, she has nothing to do with it.
It’s other people with an account here that are fed up with your stupid trolling, that’s all.
he isn’t trolling, just presenting some critical arguments with which I agree.
The Gnome (devs) culture is a hackers culture. Not going somewhere (vision) But just up and down, forward and backward. Experimenting etc. Leaving bits and pieces of unfinished functionality, try-outs.
Or maybe there is just a lack of organisation, leadership and setting clear long term goals.
This is not meant as a troll (whatever that may be)
but feel free to remove
don’t mind my englisch.
from http://www.archivemag.co.uk/gloss/T.html
Troll: a newsgroup post that is deliberately incorrect, intended to provoke readers; or a person who makes such a post
hope this helps you IP: 84.31.152
Actaully, I have never seen Gnome startup as a problem. It’s just few seconds from GDM to Gnome. There are other parts that “feel” slow, like menu. And I’m exposed to menu a bit longer, than I’m exposed to startup screen.
Well, short boot time is great, sure. But is that the priority ? NO !!! Please reduce memory usage, GNOME is so slow compared to everything else. Example : gnome-terminal vs terminal (form XFCE4), metacity vs xfwm4. Then drop some useless pieces of software (evolution, epiphany to name the worst ones), stop stupid debates like java vs .Net and just use C !!!
God, GNOME lacks of direction…
“Please reduce memory usage, GNOME is so slow compared to everything else.”
See http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
“Then drop some useless pieces of software (evolution, epiphany to name the worst ones)”
What, pray tell, makes Evolution and Epiphany “useless.” That’s a fairly strong statement. If you like, say, Thunderbird and Firefox better, that’s fine. Why denigrate other possible choices, however?
“stop stupid debates like java vs .Net and just use C !!! God, GNOME lacks of direction…”
That debate doesn’t appear to have flared up in awhile. The Novell people like to use Mono. The RedHat people like to use Python and Java. The general developer community appears to like C, C++, python, and Mono.
As for lack of direction, the active developers set the direction by what they want to hack on. There’s no dictator saying, “This is what we will do!” That is not the way KDE works either. That said, the GNOME people are putting more and more effort into GTK+ regarding speed, memory reduction, and additional useful cross-platform widgets. The goal is to make GNOME a thin layer above GTK+.
It appears to me that much of the current GNOME work is happening in the infrastructure level: cleaning up APIs, adding widgets, consolidating libraries, etc. It’s fairly exciting from a developer standpoint, especially when you factor in Cairo and D-Bus.
Yeah I hope the GNOME developers come on their daily quest for the most useful and insightful quest for implementation ideas to OSNews to read the comments of these obviously ingenius desktop developers.
Looks like startup is an issue for more programs. Recently Michael Meeks has done some research to speed up OpenOffice.org’s startup time. One of his conclusions: “So part of the problem is kernel work”
http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=…
Maybe the kernel hackers should look into these kind of problems.
i currently run debian sarge and gnome2.8 loads from gdm to desktop in about 5s. hell if i shaved 17.5s off of that it might cause some sort of time warp and suck me into my computer. -12.5s is blazin.
Gnome’s startup time has got faster in 2.12, I have it compiled from source in Slackware 10.2.
Just wanted to congratulate Lorenzo on an excellent piece of work, and a great article (even though it’s still in draft format).
Rarely do we see analysis of this depth, and too often we see and read comments of pure conjecture and speculation. Many of the comments here fall into that category.
bootchartd seems a fantastic resource, and combined with strace et al. form a formidable tool for quantative analysis. I only hope the technical barriers to the solutions mentioned are overcome and implemented.
And lets home Lorenzo and others like him move on to other subsystems in Linux, and pick off the low-hanging fruit if nothing else, we can all look forward to fast, tight Linux distrobutions that rock. Oh, for those that think they have that already, I’m sure that could run even faster . . .
i’d really like to see something done with the init before that. init is really getting of age and is not the best/flexible thing to have on a desktop.
overall the bootup time is step in the right direction. it is essential for full linux laptop experience. the next step is really working standby/hibernate.
“Last updated: 2005-10-19 02:29 CEST”
We should wait until then, perhaps the author is referring to a gnome version we don’t know yet.
I’m very impressed by this well done analysis and carefull proposal of solutions. There are few open source developers out there who actually spend time on such “boring” activities as improving startup time or reducing memory usage, as normally you don’t get so much fame as when implementing new features.
Thanks to googles summer of code and of course to lorenzo for this nice work. I hope to see some of these improvements in the next gnome version.
Seeing how this kind of work isn’t that hard, compared to actually implementing optimizations, the question is: How do we encourage this kind of work?
Research is an area that really lacks resources in OSS-world. How do we create an environment where serious resarch like this is the norm?