For a very long time my main workstation was a (now 3 12 months outdated) Dell Inspiron E1705, or "bricktop" as ajax liked to contact it. Nevertheless the hinge broke some time ago when I closed my vehicle door even though the bag was too close, and if the laptop computer began to drop apart I decided to obtain a fresh machine. Actually, I acquired two. The initial thing I did was obtain a severe desktop pc, a Dell XPS 630. It can be really a beast, especially because I got 8GB of RAM with it. I pretty typically have above 2GB of memory employed purely for web page cache, which can be almost certainly my complete functioning set of files. It can be hooked as much as a nice 24" Dell 1920x1200 keep an eye on. This personal computer is named megatron.
Needless to say, the machine is quickly and nice to use. Even so, it really is fairly unrepresentative with the general personalized computing room. So I wanted one more machine that was mobile, and also closer to what "most" folks use. So I picked up a MSI Wind U123,
Office 2007 Professional Key, called pocket. It's got just 1GB of RAM, which can be almost certainly the practical minimum we wish to help going forward (ideally we'd be workable with 512MB,
Office 2007, and we possibly are if you are just operating one particular application or a single or two web sites, but...). The machine also has an Intel 945 video clip,
Microsoft Office 2010 Pro Plus, that's also near the lowest finish graphics card we'll be supporting for GNOME Shell.
The difference in between the two computer systems is fairly severe, but I make use of the netbook fairly often, and doing work on it has forced me to optimize some issues inside the shell. It serves a similar part for overall performance concerns that canaries utilized to do in coal mines (consequently the title of this publish). Specially, I've been operating on search performance, with fairly good final results. We had some sillies inside the old lookup technique like creating lots and a lot of ClutterActors we'd by no means exhibit, not caching lowercased strings,
Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate, and so on. (another target from the means of my lookup operate is always to transfer us nearer on the latest lookup mockup, which needs to be neat).
But the biggest efficiency problem I've been running into thus far is synchronous I/O. Plenty of GNOME libraries like gnome-menus have been designed for gnome-panel, which usually you do not interact with usually, and so it can be not an enormous deal if the process is blocked. However if the shell is blocked, since we're acting like a compositor, we won't repaint the desktop or procedure input,
Office 2010 Sale, that's a serious person expertise issue. An instance of this was that we might synchronously stat (check for existence) of modern paperwork; this could easily take many hundred milliseconds in case the info is not at present from the kernel cache.
I've been reworking our docs dealing with particularly to get smarter; we use async I/O now, and only stat ones we're truly going to indicate within the UI. We could be smarter nevertheless, but this has assisted a whole lot. GIO has truly great APIs for this sort of factor.
I mention this for two causes; initial, just because you may be interested in a status update on Shell operate. The second is simply because I'm hoping to True Shortly Now land my extension program patch, so if you create an extension using it, for the very good person encounter, you'll should be very cautious about I/O as well =)
Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate cgwalters - Netbook
Linear Mode
