On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 8:57 PM, Jonathan Hutchins [email protected] wrote:
On Tuesday 12 February 2008 19:46:26 David Nicol wrote:
okay, but why doesn't, for instance gnome manager swap everything out instead of having to re-initialize itself when I reboot my etch? Because it would be more trouble than its worth, that's why.
Frankly, Gnome has always seemed to me the antithesis of swiftness and efficiency.
Frankly, suspend to disk would be super slow with a 2GB of RAM. Most of that is likely disk cache anyways, which probably isn't so useful anymore anyways. Bootcharts often present a good idea of where your time is being spent during boot, but there are substantial reasons why booting should take time.
As mentioned, disk I/O hasn't really taken off the way memory bandwidth has. Additionally, DHCP is a very slow system that could take _seconds_ to work. Mounting filesystems usually involve some time; reiserFS for example takes like 30 seconds, of mostly disk I/O. The video card usually has some timing delays to safely mode change, in case your CRT is poorly made. The way around these problems are exactly what these guys are doing -- an extremely pared down system with known attributes.
If you're a quality developer and feel that GNOME is slow, perhaps profiling GNOME startup could reveal some easy performance gains. Dave Jones did a similar experiment with X.org via strace.
Justin Dugger