[sugar] Performance

[Greg Smith]

Hi All,

I just got word from a decision maker in Uruguay that they are very 
concerned about "performance". They say that Sugar is slow. I'm probing 
to get more details but I want to evaluate the options in parallel.

Focus is on improving this in 8.2.0.

Here are the areas I can think of:
- Activity launch time
I know we had some threads on this but I don't know where we stand. Can 
I get an update and an evaluation of what it will take to greatly 
improve this?

- File/activity open
Can we improve this? A piece of the latency here may be due to a large 
Journal being much slower. Can we "chunk" journal reads or otherwise 
improve the speed of opening files? Can we speed up journal access in 
its own GUI too?

- File save
What is the bottle neck on save? Let's create a test case for this.

- Task switching
I've seen some threads on this. Can someone summarize it and give me a 
hard number to show how we have improved?

- Activity or main GUI responsiveness to cursor
It seems to me that the activities are a little slow. e.g. when I try to 
draw a line in paint, it takes a little while (maybe 100s of ms but 
noticeable) for the line to show on the screen. Similar with cursor 
placement in write or in the journal/home. Has anyone else noticed that? 
Is that due to CPU cycles or screen refresh or something else?

- Hardware
Can anyone evaluate how much faster it would be with twice the RAM? Is 
the NAND slowing us down?

This may cost us significantly if we don't show improvement. Send me 
ideas. Any quick wins would be considered, even if they have a downside 
in another metric.

I'll come back with more details on their specific concerns as soon as I 
get it.

BTW this was raised by the kids in their blog several months ago. See 
the first link here: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Unadorned_and_unedited_user_feedback

Thanks,

Greg S