Yet another reason to get angry with Bill...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 19 March 2006 04:43, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 03:02 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > gnome.org reports some substantial speed-ups for 2.14. I just
> > hope it runs faster than it compiles - it's 3am local time and
> > gnome has been compiling for 13 hours on my box - a 2600+ Athlon
> > with 512M.
> >
> > Let's see how it runs when it's done, stay tuned for feedback
>
> Oops, maybe I wasn't clear... I do run 2.14 already, as it was
> released a few days ago and found it's way into Dapper.
> If I said "I gather they improved the speed...", it's because quite
> Frankly I don't notice any "significant" improvements compared to
> Breezy/2.12.
> I might sense some slight improvements here and there, but it's
> slight so might as well be placebo effect...
> I think the problem is that I have used Dapper for 3 months now, so
> I even if there are indeed improvements, they were probably
> gradual, plus the fact that they probably too slight to be noticed
> without a side by side comparison with Breezy/2.12, which is
> impossible with only one machine on my desk...
> So I think until there are MAJOR speed improvements, in MANY
> places, it will always feel sluggish.
> It's like OpenOffice. I clocked it a year ago at about 30 or 35
> seconds when starting the word processor. Yesterday a friend told
> me that on his Mandriva machine, it takes only 15 seconds not 30. I
> was
> shocked/surprised, until I clocked it on Dapper and got similar
> times ! But I didn't notice it because although it was literally
> now twice as fast, it was still slow. I think until they manage to
> start it under 3 seconds (like Abiword or Gnumeric do), it will
> always feel slow. It's unfair, but such is a human brain... mine
> anyway :-)

Mine too :-) OOo takes 30 seconds on my machine, 25 if it's still in 
cache. AbiWord and Gnumeric both take 3 seconds whether the cache is 
hot or cold. My desktop is KDE. I recently upgraded from 3.4.3 to 
3.5.1 and was expecting some speed-ups but there were none. A lot of 
bug fixes and more functionality but the DE was the same speed

> But why do you go through the trouble of compiling gnome ? It's
> easier to just test Dapper, as you get the very latest of Gnome
> every morning :-)

Ubuntu isn't my main distro (I have a vmware session for it) so it 
isn't worth keeping it up to date daily.

> Of course if you compile, you can control the flags, but I guess
> the Ubuntu devs compile it to be as fast as possible, why would
> they do otherwise...

On a gentoo box if you don't compile gnome yourself you don't get 
gnome :-) And I have to do it manually at this point as 2.14 isn't in 
portage yet. It's an interesting experience, you find out weird stuff 
like the Evolution Makefiles have a compile dependency on Mozilla or 
Firefox...

> Sure enough, with a single processor, it's gonna take time to
> compile... please tell us how much time it took to compile, I am
> curious ! :-)

Somewhere between 12 and 20 hours for everything - I eventually went 
to bed in the wee hours. That compares well with KDE (12 hours) and 
OOo (18 hours). But don't read too much into that time, I re-compiled 
wine 7 times and did a world update at the same time gnome was 
compiling 

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five