On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 05:22:21PM -0400, Dave Crossland wrote: > > On 20 April 2016 at 16:46, James Cameron <[1]qu...@laptop.org> wrote: > > the performance ratio between our low-cost > low-power hardware and the competition was already evident on Fedora > Linux; it didn't need Windows to expose it > > Sorry if this is an obvious question, but, can anything done to make > Sugar feel faster on XO-1s today?
Yes, and I've been doing some of that in the past few months. With 13.2.7 you have my latest work, which added swap and removed several animations. Adding swap has mostly removed memory pressure. Under memory pressure, activity startup is roughly doubled, as the CPU spends time thrashing in the memory management. Disadvantage is higher power cost and possibly decreased Flash endurance, although the endurance of a set of heavily used XO-1 has shown no sign of the deterioration expected by now. Removing animations has allowed CPU cycles to be better spent on responsiveness. At one stage we had 50/50 competition between the activity launch animation and the starting activity. Instrumenting the frame and transition box animations showed there was enough time for only one or two intermediate animation states before the final state; which turned out to the cost of handling the function key release event. Some of these changes are not in Sugar master yet, but in an OLPC branch; one such was proposed, but immediately closed with appeal to process; https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/619 As for what to do next; ideas are welcome, but here's a few; - profiling, of startup, of interactive response, (i've used xdotool for interactive response tests), - upgrade Gtk3, and GObject, to fix the memory leaks, - record metrics of response, deidentify, aggregate, and report. Although at this stage the interest in XO-1 should have degraded as the units have degraded, and any return on investment is doubtful. Plenty of people left who whinge about XO-1, but ask them to test a patch or release and no response. So it's more about people wanting their rainbow pooing unicorns. Unrealistic expectations, polarised framing, denial, and consequent unwillingness to be involved. > [...] -- James Cameron http://quozl.netrek.org/ _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel