GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 388263
startup is way too slow
Last modified: 2010-04-27 16:32:27 UTC
Yelp takes way too long to start up. It takes a few seconds on a fast machine, and up to 30 seconds on a loaded machine without much RAM. The culprit being most probably gecko, is it possible to consider going back to gtkhtml in a future release? I know it has more rendering issues, but currently, the help browser is almost unusable on some systems.
Somewhat better with new paging system. Still slow, but better. The major problem is that we load a lot of gecko stuff that we don't use (ftp, lots of chrome etc.). There is no way currently to ask gecko not to load all this. Making depend on new paging system.
I can confirm this. This is results of 'time yelp' where I close it right after it loads: real 0m26.970s user 0m2.000s sys 0m1.444s It took 27 seconds to show content, but only used 3.4s of CPU. This is only 12.5% utilization.
I have System Monitor running, and it shows maximum disk usage during the time Yelp is opening. It's as if it is loading the entire help system from disk before displaying the welcome screen.
That's because it is. I'm working on this in the yelp-3-0 branch.
I don't think Gecko is the problem because: - Firefox loads on my computer (384MB RAM) in ~15 seconds. Yelp takes more than half a minute. Both use Gecko. - After the window shows up, Yelp says "Loading..." for a long long time. It takes roughly 10 seconds to get the page after the window shows up. That's as long as it takes for a full-fledged GMail to load on Firefox. If I click on a link inside Yelp (to a different page) as soon as it loads, it takes almost that much to load that as well (even if it is just the Authors page of a GNOME game). I'm not an expert, so I don't want to make any general statements. If you want any more information, I'd be glad to provide it.
This bug seems assigned, but the status is still unconfirmed. It seems I don't have access to change the status. Could someone with access please set the status. Thanks
The priority of this bug should be extremely high. I might go so far as to say that this is the single biggest issue with the 2.x branch. It renders help practically useless. Even on a Core 2 Duo with 2 GB, help sometimes takes 20 or 30 seconds to launch. It's so bad that there has been occasions where I've forgotten that I started help and then am surprised when it pops up.
It is the single biggest issue with the 2.x branch. It requires a considerable amount of surgery to fix, and there's no way that kind of surgery can be done in the 2.29 series. As I already said, this is being addressed for Yelp 3.0. Startup speed is central to the internal design of 3.0. I know exactly where the problems are. I'm actively working on those problems. More comments on this bug won't help.
*** Bug 578762 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Hi Shaun. I don't mean to come off as repetitive or impatient, but if you agree that this is the single biggest issue, and understand how much it affects the usability of a simple 'About' request, will you please acknowledge this by raising the importance?
I don't use importance or severity. Too much management for a project with one active developer. Yelp 2.31.1 does not scan the filesystem on startup. Startup times are fast again, and I won't add anything that blocks startup. So this is fixed.
Hi Shaun. Thanks for the fix. Is there anything for us to do to make sure this lands in Ubuntu 10 (Lucid)? --Buck
The Ubuntu bug for this is here, if you care to comment. https://bugs.launchpad.net/yelp/+bug/294182
Isn't the final release for Lucid in two days? 2.31.1 is the only the first release in the 2.31 development series, leading up to 3.0. It is nowhere near production quality yet. It will be ready in September along with the rest of Gnome 3.0.