startup time: autostart

[Lubos Lunak]

On Tuesday 21 May 2002 14:25, Matthias Ettrich wrote:
> When klauncher performs autostart, it reads all items from the "autostart"
> folder, sorts them according to X-KDE-autostart-after and launches them at
> the same time.
>
> On slow machines with little memory, starting those ~9 applications at the
> same time (including bigger ones like kicker and kdesktop) causes
> significant activity, hence the modified startkde scripts.
>
> Most applications, at least the big ones like kicker, kdesktop or even
> kwrited and khotkeys register with dcop. Thus we could use the dcop bus to
> figure out when the application has been started.
>
> Say we add a field
>
>     X-KDE-autostart-wait-DCOP=appname
>
> to the desktop files which makes klauncher wait for the
> DCOPClient::applicationRegistered(appname) signal.

 Isn't such functionality already available somewhere in klaucher? Looks 
familiar to me.

>
> This would serialize the startup to a large degree and could result in a
> faster and more straightforward startup without adding arbitrary waits or
> sleeps.
>

 I don't think this would help that much. Apps register very early with DCOP, 
for KUniqueApps it's even before QApplication constructor, and I think these 
days just loading the binary is the smaller part of the startup time (I may 
be wrong though). Waiting longer (until they map a window?) would probably 
give better results.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 l.lunak at email.cz ; l.lunak at kde.org
 http://dforce.sh.cvut.cz/~seli