[Sugar-devel] Performance issues on XO 1 (Re: TamTamMini)

[Daniel Narvaez]

Hi Sebastian,

It would be really useful if you could give some more informations on the
performance issues you have been seeing

- What is slow exactly?
- Why do you believe it's an issue with low level libraries (and which
libraries)?
- Did you profile?

Please don't assume people knows what they are talking about when they
speak about performance, unless they back up their claims with profiling
data, especially if they are just saying things are "lighter" and base a
toolkit switch on that!

I know fairly well what changed between gtk2 and gtk3 and I have a very
very hard time believing it introduced unfixable regressions. By
design things should have improved, as far as I know. The problem is
probably more that, as usual, the performance of the system developers
works with has improved, thus with changes comes regressions that are not
noticed. And the only way to counter that is to profile and fix the
real issues...

I'm personally going to focus on newer hardware, but then isn't  XO 1 most
of our user base currently? It seems we need to balance research and
continued support here... Also note that the new hardware isn't going to be
blazing fast either, the issue we find there are most likely very similar
to the ones on the XO 1, just to a lesser scale. If we improve XO 1, other
hardware will most likely improve too.

I think we need to get much better collectively at working on performance,
it's a key aspect of the kind of hardware we are targeting and my feeling
is that a lot of people don't like Sugar mostly because it's so slow...

On Monday, 18 November 2013, Sebastian Silva wrote:

>  El 17/11/13 12:58, Gonzalo Odiard escribió:
>
> I hope we can solve the performance problems then you don't need use a old
> Sugar version,
> to avoid all these problems.
>
>
> Well, I don't think it's likely you or me will be able to fix this one.
> It's lower level than Python
> and it looks to be by design of the lower level libraries.
>
> Note this mainly affects the XO1 which is already considered End Of Life.
> I think efforts are
> much more productive in trying to make the GNU+Sugar user experience
> excellent on
> Classmates and other netbooks.
>
> BTW, we are not the only ones affected. The entire LXDE desktop
> environment has decided
> to forego migrating to GTK3 and instead decided to port everything to QT.
>
> Here's a quote from the initial release of the QT file manager PCManFM [1]:
> *"I, however, need to admit that working with Qt/C++ is much more pleasant
> and productive than messing with C/GObject/GTK+.*
> *Since GTK+ 3 breaks backward compatibility a lot and it becomes more
> memory hungry and slower, I don’t see much advantage of GTK+ now. GTK+ 2 is
> lighter, but it’s no longer true for GTK+ 3. Ironically, fixing all of the
> broken compatibility is even harder than porting to Qt in some cases
> (PCManFM IMO is one of them).*
> *So If someone is starting a whole new project and is thinking about what
> GUI toolkit to use, personally I might recommend Qt if you’re not targeting
> Gnome 3.*
>
> *" [1] *http://blog.lxde.org/?p=990
>


-- 
Daniel Narvaez
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