Hi On 20 April 2016 at 18:27, James Cameron <qu...@laptop.org> wrote:
> 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. AWESOME > With 13.2.7 you have my latest work, which added swap and removed several > animations. > Great :) > Adding swap has mostly removed memory pressure. Is it possible to configure the swap to run on the SD card, which, if failing due to thrashing, can easily be replaced? > Under memory > pressure, activity startup is roughly doubled, WOW > 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. > Yes, it is somewhat astonishing to me that any XO-1 are still working at all :) I would have thought they'd all have cracked screens and ripped keyboards by now. Maybe this was brought up on the XO-1 thread I started, but I didn't remember if so; does anyone has any suggestions about how many XO-1s are still in use? > 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. Woah :) > 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 I sympathise with Sam's request to discuss further; eg, perhaps there is a compromise by wrapping the decision to animate in an if/else block that checks some cpuinfo in /proc, or if the number of running activities can be obtained very cheaply through a len() call or something? > 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), > AWESOME! Could you make a screencast showing how to set this up? > - upgrade Gtk3, and GObject, to fix the memory leaks, > I like it! > - record metrics of response, deidentify, aggregate, and report. > I think this kind of data driven development is crucially important :) > Although at this stage the interest in XO-1 should have degraded as > the units have degraded, and any return on investment is doubtful. > I'm not sure; even if the XO-1 units themselves are gone, the cheapest computers will always be puny, either (non-)refurbished clunkers passed down to kids, or $5 computers like the Raspbery Pi Zero. By optimizing for XO-1, we optimize for spending power of small children. > Plenty of people left who whinge about XO-1, but ask them to test a > patch or release and no response. > Kindly, this is because you assume too much technical skills/experience on their part, and I suspect that there is a "tact filter mismatch" per www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html :) This was/is also a brake on the speed of development of the fontforge community, which is written in C and has its own X toolkit; the community of C developers were generally unwilling to 'baby step' enthusiastic but inexperienced community peers in how to apply and test patches. > So it's more about people wanting their rainbow pooing unicorns. > Unrealistic expectations, polarised framing, denial, and consequent > unwillingness to be involved. I am again reminded of https://youtu.be/N9c7_8Gp7gI?t=9m1s 9m1s to 10m23s as an amusing anecdote about how to work productively with people who are setting out to work against you :) -- Cheers Dave
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