Windows 7 X64 cgwalters - Netbook in the coal mine

For a very long time my primary workstation was a (now 3 yr old) Dell Inspiron E1705, or "bricktop" as ajax liked to phone it. However the hinge broke some time back when I closed my car door although the bag was also close,Office Standard 2010 Key, and once the laptop computer began to drop apart I decided to obtain a new machine. In fact, I received two. The primary thing I did was get a significant desktop computer, a Dell XPS 630. It's quite a beast, specially since I got 8GB of RAM with it. I rather usually have about 2GB of memory utilised purely for page cache, that's possibly my entire operating set of files. It can be hooked up to a nice 24" Dell 1920x1200 check. This personal computer is named megatron.
Needless to say, the machine is fast and nice to use. However,Office 2010 Professional Plus Key, it is relatively unrepresentative from the common private computing space. So I wished yet another machine which was cellular, and also nearer to what "most" men and women use. So I picked up a MSI Wind U123, called pocket. It has just 1GB of RAM,Windows 7 X64, that is most likely the practical minimal we desire to help heading forward (ideally we'd be workable with 512MB, and we possibly are if you are just working one software or a single or two internet sites,Windows 7 Home Premium Product Key, but...). The machine also has an Intel 945 video clip, that is also close to the lowest conclude graphics card we'll be supporting for GNOME Shell.
The distinction in between the two computer systems is fairly extreme, but I make use of the netbook very often, and functioning on it's got compelled me to optimize some points in the shell. It serves an identical position for functionality concerns that canaries utilised to complete in coal mines (hence the title of this publish). Particularly, I've been working on search overall performance, with rather good benefits. We had some sillies inside the aged search method like developing a lot and a great deal of ClutterActors we'd never ever display, not caching lowercased strings, and so forth. (one other aim by the means of my search function would be to transfer us nearer towards the current search mockup, which needs to be cool).
But the biggest efficiency difficulty I've been running into up to now is synchronous I/O. Lots of GNOME libraries like gnome-menus had been designed for gnome-panel, which typically you do not interact with frequently, and so it's not a large deal if the method is blocked. Even so if the shell is blocked, because we're acting as being a compositor, we will not likely repaint the desktop or process input, which can be a critical consumer knowledge issue. An illustration of this was that we would synchronously stat (examine for existence) of recent paperwork; this could quickly take several hundred milliseconds if the info isn't currently from the kernel cache.
I've been reworking our docs managing especially to become smarter; we use async I/O now, and only stat ones we're truly heading to point out inside the UI. We might be smarter nonetheless,Office 2007 Download, but this has served a good deal. GIO has truly nice APIs for this type of point.
I point out this for 2 factors; 1st, simply because you might be considering a standing update on Shell perform. The next is because I'm hoping to Actual Shortly Now land my extension technique patch, so should you create an extension employing it, for any very good user encounter, you are going to must be quite cautious about I/O too =)