Just to show how the new interface looks like and behaves.
Author Archive for xhochy
Using strace I wanted to make up some statistics how many files pidgin loads during a 5 second startup time. Using grep and regexes the following is shown:
Attempts to a open file: 2886
Failed Attempts: 1457
Opened(non-failed) for read-only: 1407
Opened(non-failed) for read-only without those from /var/cache: 1371
Shared libraries: 213
PNG-images: 90
ICON-images: 164
Using OProfile and GProf2Dot I finally made a callgraph for the first 5 seocnds of a Pidgin startup with a simple Yahoo Messenger Account configured(No I’m not a YIM supporter, this was just the account I used for testing, all my other accounts are to busy to log in/off every 10 seconds(my friends would all get annoyed ;-)) This graph shows directly that time is spend in calling do_lookup_x in ld-2.7.so whichs source is in most cases dlopen_doit.
Considering the boottime, nearly always people benchmark the time until the login screen shows up, but the enduser is not really only interested how long it takes until he could login, he wants to get as fast as possible to his running desktop and his favourite app running. Due to the last fact I’m starting pidgin directly with the GNOME session, so that it will as fast as possible available to the user. Here is my bootchart graph only with the optimizations mentioned before in this blog, since I stopped bootchart manually, you should the startup finished at the point where disk and cpu utilization are back to 0%. After substracting the time I needed to enter the harddisk-password(2,5 sec) and the user-password(2sec) you get a startup time of 89 seconds.
Yet another boot performance tip(YABPT):
To keep it short: While booting your Ubuntu System, you shouldn’t have a CD in your drive because this causes hald-probe-volume to run for 10 seconds.