Slow dialer

[Thomas Wood]

On Fri, 2008-03-21 at 09:41 -0500, Bobby Martin wrote:
> Does anyone know why the dialer takes multiple seconds to come up?  Is
> it just rendering the themed gtk widgets that is the slow-down?

Rendering the GTK widgets may be one reason, but if you switch back and
forth between call log and the main dial pad, that should give you some
indication on how long it takes to render. Even with the current theme,
it's less than half a second (but more than the crucial 0.1 seconds to
which makes it noticeable).

> 
> I know I could build an ugly dialer that occupied almost no memory and
> just kicked off libgsmd-tool when you try to dial a number...
> 
> My point is, shouldn't the dialer be a part of the home application,
> always running, and with the UI coming up in a fraction of a second
> after you click the dialer button?

This is certainly possible, but the question is, what do you limit this
approach to. Shouldn't the messages, contacts and calendar programs also
come up in a fraction of a second?

What would be interesting would be to investigate techniques like those
used in maemo-launcher to speed up launch speed.

See this web page for more details:
http://maemo.org/development/documentation/how-tos/4-x/maemo_architecture.html#launcher

The other thing to do is to profile these applications as Federico
Mena-Quintero has been done to measure startup time.

http://www.gnome.org/~federico/hacks/index.html#performance-scripts

He gave an interesting presentation on this subject at Fosdem 2007:

http://www.gnome.org/~federico/docs/2007-02-FOSDEM/html/index.html
http://ftp.belnet.be/mirrors/FOSDEM/2007/FOSDEM2007-ProfilingDesktopApplication.ogg

Although he first talks about hard disk I/O, the profiling ideas are all
relevant here too.

Regards,

Thomas

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