[sugar] Performance

[Greg Smith]

Hi Michael,

7395 has a release contract (see http://dev.laptop.org/report/18)

I believe that we will lose a lot of other work too if we don't fix it.

What do we need to do to get this assigned and resolved?

I upped the priority to Blocker (will negotiate from there as needed :-).

All,

Looking past 8.2.0 (AKA last call for quick wins :-).

On the question of what are they doing, they have a journal. I don't 
know how we can get it or what we would do with it but the journal is a 
complete record.

I have two 656 XOs on my desk, both of which are painfully slow. One is 
the XO I got w/G1G1 in December. Its mostly unusable. The other is about 
85% full on the NAND (I tried to fill it when testing recent issue). Its 
very slow too but a little better. I have those journals if you want them.

Here are my impressions:
- very slow to launch activity
- long wait for frame to appear and disappear, compounded by cursor 
twitchiness
- impossible to open anything from the journal which looks like slowness
- slow to save

Its a matter of seconds in each case (e.g. 5 seconds to save  (keep) 
simple animation from cartoon builder. I think the challenge is that 
every click costs 5 seconds or more which makes for a very frustrating 
experience

I think we can test and verify this area if we have something to try. 
Does anyone have examples of changes in 708 that may be related to the 
above?

Can someone help me layout a strategy for improving this on the 9.1.0 page?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Performance_and_Reliability

Performance is not one of Ben's top 6 but I think it deserves a similar 
scoping and definition so we can prioritize it appropriately.

Thanks,

Greg S


Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi Greg,
> 
>    > 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?
> 
> The best thing we can do here is to free up someone to work on #7395:
> we made huge gains in activity startup, and have lost them again with
> the switch to Fedora 9, until someone can work on having Rainbow
> launched from Upstart after X has launched.  Normally Michael would
> work on this, but he's swamped.
> 
> It might be possible to get help with this via a call for help on the
> new fedora-olpc list, if there's anyone there with Upstart knowledge.
> 
> - Chris.