GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 645334
applications search is slow
Last modified: 2011-03-21 00:26:11 UTC
The application search experience still feels rather laggy. If you write your searches fast enough (so the initial search result is only a few items) it is pretty fast, but if you peck one letter at a time it's a pretty poor experience: It can take up to 2 secs before a one- or two-letter search gives any results. System is dual core i7 with i915 with up-to-date jhbuild.
I would like to propose a simple solution to mitigate the impacts of the amount of matches: do not start searching/filtering until the user has typed at least 3 or more letters. It does not make sense to do so (how often do you search for two letter words or try to launch an application with less than three letters? there are too many results when you do so), and I'm pretty sure that performance would feel much better if it only starts matching when it has 3+ letters in a string.
(In reply to comment #1) > do not start searching/filtering until the user has typed at least 3 or more letters. It require adjustment of UI. > how often do you search for two letter words or try to launch an application with less than three letters? every day:) for emacs, firefox, gedit > I'm pretty sure that performance would feel much better if it only starts matching when it has 3+ letters in a string. I think, perfomance is acceptable with this patch.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 645313 ***