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

[Sebastian Silva]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your thoughtful answer. I reply inline to the issues raised.

El 18/11/13 08:30, Daniel Narvaez escribió:
> 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?
Initial startup, switch between activities, activity startup. Also 
probably redraw after widget damage e.g. the Frame appears. Then again 
it's hard to pinpoint exactly, just out of memory now.
> - Why do you believe it's an issue with low level libraries (and which 
> libraries)?
I like to dogfood. I do all my work on a low end atom netbook. I have 
observed in my own use how applications ported to GTK3 have degraded 
performance (e.g. Evince, Gnumeric). I have come to expect this, really 
as I experienced the same thing when moving as a user from GTK1 to GTK2.
> - Did you profile?
Nope, but our images are still in beta and I'd be willing to profile and 
share the results by default. If it will help then we can have a metric.
>
> 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'm sure that they at least carefully measured the memory usage. On XO1 
this is critical with only 256mb ram. Also the OS by default has no swap.
>
> 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...
Understood. However it's a little out of my league, I admit. I tend to 
focus on serving low hanging fruit in a user friendly plate. This is why 
distributions interest me so much.
>
> 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.
Yes, only in newer hardware the impression that the Sugar user 
experience is not very good is not really related to performance, or at 
least, not primarily.
>
> 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...
A platform is about the applications available to it. Sugar in my 
opinion has issues here as well. I tend to concur with Flavio that some 
aesthetics rework wouldn't hurt either. For what it's worth I always 
found interesting what the advertising firm that worked on Sugar 
published in their website: 
http://new.pentagram.com/2006/12/new-work-one-laptop-per-child/

On the topic of aesthetics, it's interesting to see what even happens 
with adding a compositor (in metacity's gconf key) and changing some 
colors in style.py
I recently noticed that in ancient versions (pre 0.82) the Journal items 
were separated with a thin line. This helped readability and gave the 
sense that each line was an object.

Maybe I just went off topic (again) but now that we are sharing...
>
> -- 
> Daniel Narvaez
>

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