comments on KDE performance tips

[Waldo Bastian]

On Thursday 16 January 2003 14:29, Alexander Kellett wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 02:29:48PM +0100, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > On Tuesday 14 of January 2003 06:26, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > I assume these applications are also reading zillions of little config,
> > > font, icon, etc files as well.  That'll hurt.  One possible way of
> > > speeding that up would be for the application to maintain its own cache
> > > (on-disk) of all the info which it needed to start itself up.  So on
> > > the second startup it can all be read in in a single swipe.  Obviously,
> > > information coherency is an issue here.
> >
> > Unfortunately, there are many files that could be accessed by various KDE
> > apps during their startup. This wouldn't be easy.
>
> doesn't gconf have answers for this sort of problem?
> i thought they used a central db and a cache, and alerted
> apps of config changes and stuff?

It's cold file-access that's expensive. Does it matter whether the app pays 
that price itself or whether the gconf daemon pays it instead? You could 
theoretically win somewhat by using a cache (That's the idea behind ksycoca) 
but keeping a cache in sync is a pain and might very well outweigh any 
benefit. (That's why ksycoca limits itself to rather static content)

Not that GConf is a bad idea but I just don't think it improves performance.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
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