For a very long time my major workstation was a (now three yr previous) Dell Inspiron E1705,
Office 2007 Download, or "bricktop" as ajax liked to get in touch with it. Nonetheless the hinge broke some time back when I closed my car door even though the bag was as well shut, and when the laptop computer began to fall apart I decided to get a brand new machine. In fact,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus, I received two. The initial factor I did was obtain a significant desktop personal computer, a Dell XPS 630. It is really a beast, specifically given that I received 8GB of RAM with it. I pretty normally have about 2GB of memory used purely for web page cache, which is possibly my total doing work set of files. It's hooked approximately a nice 24" Dell 1920x1200 monitor. This pc is named megatron.
Needless to say,
Buy Windows 7, the machine is quick and wonderful to use. However, it's relatively unrepresentative with the common private computing room. So I wished one more machine that was cellular, and also nearer to what "most" men and women use. So I picked up a MSI Wind U123,
Buy Office 2010, known as pocket. It has just 1GB of RAM, which is probably the realistic minimum we desire to support heading forward (ideally we'd be workable with 512MB, and we probably are if you're just working one particular application or one particular or two web sites, but...). The machine also has an Intel 945 video clip, which can be also near the lowest finish graphics card we'll be supporting for GNOME Shell.
The variation among the 2 pcs is instead severe, but I use the netbook very often, and operating on it's forced me to optimize some issues in the shell. It serves an identical role for efficiency problems that canaries utilized to complete in coal mines (consequently the title of this post). Especially, I've been functioning on search efficiency, with fairly very good final results. We had a couple of sillies from the aged search system like making a lot and lots of ClutterActors we'd never ever screen, not caching lowercased strings, and so on. (the opposite goal from the means of my lookup function is always to move us closer to the current search mockup, which must be neat).
But the largest overall performance difficulty I've been running into so far is synchronous I/O. A lot of GNOME libraries like gnome-menus had been created for gnome-panel, which typically you do not interact with typically, and so it's not a big offer when the approach is blocked. However when the shell is blocked, because we're acting as a compositor, we will not likely repaint the desktop or process input,
Office 2007 Serial, that is a significant person expertise issue. An illustration of this was that we would synchronously stat (examine for existence) of recent documents; this could easily take several hundred milliseconds if the information just isn't presently within the kernel cache.
I've been reworking our docs handling specifically to become smarter; we use async I/O now, and only stat ones we're in fact heading to indicate within the UI. We may be smarter still, but this has aided a good deal. GIO has actually great APIs for this sort of thing.
I mention this for two causes; initial, simply because you might be interested in a standing update on Shell operate. The next is due to the fact I am hoping to Real Shortly Now land my extension method patch, so if you produce an extension employing it, for the good consumer experience, you are going to should be quite watchful about I/O also =)