Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On 03/30/2009 07:28 AM, Mat Tomaszewski wrote: Scott James Remnant wrote: On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 22:25 +0100, Ernst Persson wrote: I saw Scott removing animation from gnome login. What's the reason for that? I don't see any motivation or reference to a bugreport. There's a reference to an upstream bug report in the patch itself. It was removed because it takes up more time of the boot/login sequence than it should (around 3s). As a user, I did not notice the boot speed improvement. What I noticed was a really clumsy experience of panel background popping up before everything else. In practice, there are better ways to signify the desktop is ready than have each individual component individually animating in their own way. One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. This is something we need to explore and apply as soon as possible. I must say I feel that disabling the animation does not improve things to an extent that would justify a really bad visual experience that we now have. Mat I'm sorry I'm not up to date on what everyone means by animation Is this strictly Compiz users? -- Sincerely Yours, John Vivirito https://launchpad.net/~gnomefreak https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JohnVivirito Linux User# 414246 How can i get lost, if i have no where to go -- Metallica from Unforgiven III signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
Scott James Remnant wrote: On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 22:25 +0100, Ernst Persson wrote: I saw Scott removing animation from gnome login. What's the reason for that? I don't see any motivation or reference to a bugreport. There's a reference to an upstream bug report in the patch itself. It was removed because it takes up more time of the boot/login sequence than it should (around 3s). As a user, I did not notice the boot speed improvement. What I noticed was a really clumsy experience of panel background popping up before everything else. In practice, there are better ways to signify the desktop is ready than have each individual component individually animating in their own way. One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. This is something we need to explore and apply as soon as possible. I must say I feel that disabling the animation does not improve things to an extent that would justify a really bad visual experience that we now have. Mat -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
2009/3/30 John Vivirito gnomefr...@gmail.com: I'm sorry I'm not up to date on what everyone means by animation Is this strictly Compiz users? No, there was a fade-in, like you get when you switch the background. -- Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (RainCT) Ubuntu Developer. Debian Contributor. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On 03/30/2009 09:09 AM, Siegfried-Angel wrote: 2009/3/30 John Vivirito gnomefr...@gmail.com: I'm sorry I'm not up to date on what everyone means by animation Is this strictly Compiz users? No, there was a fade-in, like you get when you switch the background. Thanks -- Sincerely Yours, John Vivirito https://launchpad.net/~gnomefreak https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JohnVivirito Linux User# 414246 How can i get lost, if i have no where to go -- Metallica from Unforgiven III signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
ke, 2009-03-25 kello 23:38 +, Matt Wheeler kirjoitti: 2009/3/25 Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt: No. Sqlite likes to fsync(). Ext3 blocks the whole system when you fsync(). Remember when Firefox 3 first appeared in Ubuntu? I don't think fsync() is inherently bad, just it's overuse. More interesting, to me, is the question why gconfd needs to write much at all during a login. No configuration changes should be happening then. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 23:38 +, Matt Wheeler wrote: Looking at the source for gconf2 it looks like the xml backend is abstracted quite neatly from the main body of the code so perhaps it wouldn't be too difficult to create an experimental sqlite/somedb backend and compare performance. In fact, gconf was always intended to have pluggable back-ends including a db, it's just that nobody got around to writing anything but the xml backend. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 16:10 +0200, Marius Gedminas wrote: No. Sqlite likes to fsync(). Ext3 blocks the whole system when you fsync(). Remember when Firefox 3 first appeared in Ubuntu? Whereas ext4 will probably require you to fsync() almost every damned time before you close a file. http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/ Scott -- Scott James Remnant sc...@canonical.com signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 07:51:38PM +, Matt Wheeler wrote: 2009/3/24 Timo Jyrinki timo.jyri...@gmail.com: And the I/O problem comes from the hundreds/thousands of small files that are inefficiently read. The amount of transferred data is not that much that it would take more than 2-4s to read on modern even laptop hard drives, if the data would be sequentially available in a one big chunk. So if gconf used sqlite or something similar rather than ~/.gconf/blah/blah/blah/%gconf.xml, that would improve login times a lot? No. Sqlite likes to fsync(). Ext3 blocks the whole system when you fsync(). Remember when Firefox 3 first appeared in Ubuntu? Although, if read-only operations don't fsync(), and if GNOME doesn't actually update any gconf settings at boot time, maybe boot would be improved, at the cost of subsequent disk spinups. I'm wondering why readahead doesn't load all those thousands of small files needed for desktop startup during boot, before I try to log in. I'm guessing that it just doesn't know the particular ones that I need - everyone's GNOME settings are different, applets are different, wallpapers are different, themes are different. Marius Gedminas -- niemeyer philiKON: I'm changing ZCML to parse files twice as fast.. philiKON niemeyer, weee benjiooh, I like it! philiKON how do you do that? niemeyer Lying philiKON i knew it * benji cries fowl! -- #zope3-dev signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
2009/3/25 Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt: I'm wondering why readahead doesn't load all those thousands of small files needed for desktop startup during boot, before I try to log in. I'm guessing that it just doesn't know the particular ones that I need - everyone's GNOME settings are different, applets are different, wallpapers are different, themes are different. Right, but also it wouldn't help since simply seeking to one thousand files with an average seek time of 15ms (seek + rotational latency) would mean 15 seconds of pure seeking, not to say anything about actually transferring data (or doing something about the data on the cpu). And I'd like grub - desktop loaded to be eg. 10s. Readahead is already doing good things, and it should be loading the files it does in an order that reduces the seek time (it can fetch things as they are ordered on the disk), but in the end the amount of files and seeking should be anyway reduced AFAIK. But optimization during 9.04 has concentrated on a lot of other subjects which prevent fast boot anyway, so it's also a matter of the whole picture - if there is anything halting the boot, it doesn't help if one part is completely optimized. -Timo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
2009/3/25 Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt: No. Sqlite likes to fsync(). Ext3 blocks the whole system when you fsync(). Remember when Firefox 3 first appeared in Ubuntu? I don't think fsync() is inherently bad, just it's overuse. Surely it would be possible to configure gconf in such a way that it batched writes to the db. A disadvantage with that could be if there's a crash between a change being made and the change being written to the db it would be lost, but I don't think that's particularly serious, it's just a setting, not data. Although, if read-only operations don't fsync(), and if GNOME doesn't actually update any gconf settings at boot time, maybe boot would be improved, at the cost of subsequent disk spinups. I'm quite sure sqlite reads don't trigger fsync()s, and if there are writes then batching them would stop that being an issue. A potential issue with this is any apps that are using gconf wrong (i.e. reading their own xml files rather than asking gconfd), I've no idea whether there are any that do that though. I'm not even pointing at sqlite specifically, I perhaps there's a better db format that could be used, I just think that multiple xml files is not ideal for gconf at all. Looking at the source for gconf2 it looks like the xml backend is abstracted quite neatly from the main body of the code so perhaps it wouldn't be too difficult to create an experimental sqlite/somedb backend and compare performance. Sorry if I'm barking up the wrong tree here and making unecessary noise, just thought it was best to voice my idea in case it turns out to be a good one ;) Thanks -- Matt Wheeler m...@funkyhat.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
2009/3/25 Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt: On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 07:51:38PM +, Matt Wheeler wrote: 2009/3/24 Timo Jyrinki timo.jyri...@gmail.com: And the I/O problem comes from the hundreds/thousands of small files that are inefficiently read. The amount of transferred data is not that much that it would take more than 2-4s to read on modern even laptop hard drives, if the data would be sequentially available in a one big chunk. So if gconf used sqlite or something similar rather than ~/.gconf/blah/blah/blah/%gconf.xml, that would improve login times a lot? No. Sqlite likes to fsync(). Ext3 blocks the whole system when you fsync(). Remember when Firefox 3 first appeared in Ubuntu? Bug in Ext3. Here's a proper fsync() flow for you: - write chunks of data [A] [B] [C] - Write data [D] - fsync() - Begin syncing [A] [B] [C] [D] to disk (with allocate-on-flush i.e. ext4, do that allocate) - Some program writes data [E], cache this as normal. - Write data [F] - fsync() while data [C] is still being written to disk - Extend current sync to include [D] [E] [F] (for AoF, re-allocate anything that you haven't started writing); start at the earliest piece of data if desired - etc etc etc In other words, when you flush (by fsync() or any other means), the kernel should internally snapshot what data is going to disk, do any allocation needed, and start writing it on the platters. Further writes to that or any other file should be accepted, and cached as normal. Flushes occuring during flushes (such as an fsync() on another file; an automatic write-out; a sync(); etc) should just update what's getting flushed to disk and continue on. The file system should not block the whole file system just because someone is flushing to disk. If you write file X and fsync(), I should be able to write more to file X, with the stipulation that the file as it existed when you called fsync() is going to disk now and my changes aren't yet. If you write file X and fsync(), I should be able to write file Y and even fsync() it if I want. If you call sync(), and a bunch of other files get written while that sync() happens, the file system should keep handling that stuff like normal and put it in cache until it's told to sync() again or decides the data's old and needs to go to disk-- even if that last sync() is still happening. Of course fsync() and sync() will still block as they normally do or don't, with the same stipulation. Just one call to fsync() might return before another call to fsync() (even an earlier one made on a much bigger file, depending on how the IO scheduler works). Maybe someone should look at how syncs work -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
2009/3/23 Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt: Personally, for me the desktop startup is (or feels) I/O-bound, with the panel applets showing up one by one with agonizing pauses in between and the disk running at full throttle. Yes, it is. In jaunty, the current warm start (everything in cache, ie. login, logout and then login again) time is ca. 5 seconds, with compiz, something that would be actually ok for a login time in general instead of the current status. And the I/O problem comes from the hundreds/thousands of small files that are inefficiently read. The amount of transferred data is not that much that it would take more than 2-4s to read on modern even laptop hard drives, if the data would be sequentially available in a one big chunk. 2009/3/23 Evan eapa...@gmail.com: My guess is that it's a bug in Compiz, coincidentally introduced in the same cycle as compiz-by-default. When I disable desktop effects (running intrepid) my login speeds up by a good 15 seconds. Does anybody else notice this? This has been fixed in the newer libcompizconfig in jaunty. -Timo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 22:25 +0100, Ernst Persson wrote: I saw Scott removing animation from gnome login. What's the reason for that? I don't see any motivation or reference to a bugreport. There's a reference to an upstream bug report in the patch itself. It was removed because it takes up more time of the boot/login sequence than it should (around 3s). In practice, there are better ways to signify the desktop is ready than have each individual component individually animating in their own way. One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. Scott -- Scott James Remnant sc...@canonical.com signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
ma, 2009-03-23 kello 11:57 +, Scott James Remnant kirjoitti: On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 22:25 +0100, Ernst Persson wrote: I saw Scott removing animation from gnome login. What's the reason for that? I don't see any motivation or reference to a bugreport. There's a reference to an upstream bug report in the patch itself. It was removed because it takes up more time of the boot/login sequence than it should (around 3s). In practice, there are better ways to signify the desktop is ready than have each individual component individually animating in their own way. One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. That would be one good idea. An even better idea would be that it takes so short a time that there is no need to inform the user... :) -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Monday 23 March 2009 9:18:59 am Lars Wirzenius wrote: ma, 2009-03-23 kello 11:57 +, Scott James Remnant kirjoitti: One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. That would be one good idea. An even better idea would be that it takes so short a time that there is no need to inform the user... :) Anyone ever figure out what the heck happened after Feisty to make login so slow? -- Mackenzie Morgan http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com apt-get moo signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 09:43 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: On Monday 23 March 2009 9:18:59 am Lars Wirzenius wrote: ma, 2009-03-23 kello 11:57 +, Scott James Remnant kirjoitti: One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. That would be one good idea. An even better idea would be that it takes so short a time that there is no need to inform the user... :) Anyone ever figure out what the heck happened after Feisty to make login so slow? When did we do compiz-by-default? Scott -- Scott James Remnant sc...@canonical.com signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Monday 23 March 2009 10:02:53 am Scott James Remnant wrote: On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 09:43 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: On Monday 23 March 2009 9:18:59 am Lars Wirzenius wrote: ma, 2009-03-23 kello 11:57 +, Scott James Remnant kirjoitti: One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. That would be one good idea. An even better idea would be that it takes so short a time that there is no need to inform the user... :) Anyone ever figure out what the heck happened after Feisty to make login so slow? When did we do compiz-by-default? That only seems like it should matter if you didn't use Compiz in Feisty and did in Gutsy. I used Beryl in Edgy up until it remerged with Compiz, then Compiz from then on, and I still noticed the slow-down. -- Mackenzie Morgan http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com apt-get moo signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 09:43:58AM -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: On Monday 23 March 2009 9:18:59 am Lars Wirzenius wrote: ma, 2009-03-23 kello 11:57 +, Scott James Remnant kirjoitti: One good idea would be that the screen holds at the login screen after entering your password (e.g. with Logging in...) and the desktop fades in when everything's ready. That would be one good idea. An even better idea would be that it takes so short a time that there is no need to inform the user... :) Anyone ever figure out what the heck happened after Feisty to make login so slow? Federico Mena-Quintero has a series of articles about the GNOME startup process: http://www.gnome.org/~federico/index.html#improving-login-time Behdad Esfahbod also: http://mces.blogspot.com/2008/10/improving-login-time-part-1-gnome.html These are not cross-referenced to Ubuntu releases, but I suspect are talking about the same inefficiencies in gnome-session, gnome-settings-daemon etc. Personally, for me the desktop startup is (or feels) I/O-bound, with the panel applets showing up one by one with agonizing pauses in between and the disk running at full throttle. Marius Gedminas -- We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company. signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
2009/3/23 Mackenzie Morgan maco...@gmail.com On Monday 23 March 2009 10:02:53 am Scott James Remnant wrote: When did we do compiz-by-default? That only seems like it should matter if you didn't use Compiz in Feisty and did in Gutsy. I used Beryl in Edgy up until it remerged with Compiz, then Compiz from then on, and I still noticed the slow-down. My guess is that it's a bug in Compiz, coincidentally introduced in the same cycle as compiz-by-default. When I disable desktop effects (running intrepid) my login speeds up by a good 15 seconds. Does anybody else notice this? Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reason for removing animation from Gnome login?
On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 22:25 +0100, Ernst Persson wrote: Hi, I saw Scott removing animation from gnome login. What's the reason for that? I don't see any motivation or reference to a bugreport. It works very nice here and looks nice with all the nvidia drivers, nv, nouveau and nvidia. In one of the comparative-startup-time threads it was mentioned that these effects added ~2sec each to the startup time on someone's (I think Scott's) system. It might be good to have that documented somewhere, possibly the changelog. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
