[Kopete-bugs] [Bug 164979] New: ridiculous brain damage in the way kopete reads (at least) config files

[Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164979         
           Summary: ridiculous brain damage in the way kopete reads (at
                    least) config files
           Product: kopete
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Ubuntu Packages
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: kopete-bugs kde org
        ReportedBy: rudd-o rudd-o com


Version:            (using KDE 4.0.83)
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages
OS:                Linux

What I am about to attach is a heavily compressed strace output file from a started-from-scratch, configured Kopete (the latest version that came together with KDE 4.1 Beta 2).  The application never finished to start because I interrupted it after OVER FOUR MINUTES on a dual core machine running ZFS.  Yes, ZFS is slow.  That's not the point.  Please note the following things:

grep -E '(stat|open)' kopetetrace.2697 | wc -l
122432

122000 stat/open calls on a program that hasn't even finished to start but it's in a permanent grey window state?  Upon further inspection, you see it statting thousands of times several kde4globals files and ALL its component directories.  What happened to plain old just open()?  Is the hundreds of thousands of statting some sort of foreplay for an operation that you will know for certain failed or succeeded?  And what's with the statting of container directories up to the root directory?  And why is this application statting the SAME PATHS over and over again?  Don't you see this would kill NFS performance as well?  Can't you cache the kde4globals files until you get an async reconfig notification or something?

You know what, I'll just let you process the file and figure out this brain damage.  I honestly don't know why no one has measured the amount of work your library calls do, but Konqueror, a clearly more complex application, takes a fraction of the time to start than Kopete does (it probably does have quite a lot of syscall braindamage as well, and I'm speculating on how long kopete takes to start under these conditions, because I got BORED of waiting for it to start).