Kill the splash screen, finally?

[Kevin Funk]

On Friday, February 19, 2016 12:42:52 AM Milian Wolff wrote:
> On Donnerstag, 18. Februar 2016 22:26:00 CET Sven Brauch wrote:
> > *shrug* okay with me. I thought I profiled it back then and it didn't
> > have much impact. Then again, 1.8s startup time is _extremely_ fast and
> > a warm-start, on older systems it might well take >20s to start up the
> > first time and I doubt 5s of that is taken up by the splash. And for the
> > 
> > >20s case it does provide a useful visual feedback that something is
> > 
> > happening.
> > 
> > But I don't have very strong opinions on this.
> 
> I think we should kill the splash as a separate window and instead work on
> getting the full window up ASAP, and then potentially display a spinner or
> similar in there.
> 
> Kevin, remember that you are using an SSD - without it, startup is still
> much slower... We do load tons of libs/plugins after all.

I remember that. Still most applications I know do not / no longer use a 
splash screen either. Also note how different the plugin loading is compared 
to KDE4 times: We pack most of the resources into the .so, no more .desktop 
file overhead, etc., this all brings a performance gain.

Also note that any decent DE out there still informs the user about loading 
applications: there's the bouncing icon under KDE, hourglass on Windows, etc.

> Also, do drop your caches between the restarts to measure the startup time.

I measured before, here are my numbers:
* cold cache with splash: 3444 ms (until entering event loop)
* cold cache without splash: 1159 ms
* warm cache with splash: 1551 ms
* warm cache without splash: 769 ms

^ I think the numbers speak for themselves. Especially the cold cache startup 
seems to be delayed significantly with the splash screen (though I can't 
really explain why that's the case, the Welcome Page pulls in the QML 
libraries as well, though its QML is evaluated async now with my other patch)

> Bye

Please try for yourself, the difference in startup speed is perceptible.

Someone out there with a really crappy hard drive who wants to test? :)
  KDEV_DISABLE_SPLASH=1 kdevelop -n yada

Check the line which says "Done startup".

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Funk | kfunk at kde.org | http://kfunk.org
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