Performance tools: X is a client/server system. It is (relatively) simple to set up a set of machines that separate the client and the X server, and then look at the network traffic between them. It is *very* enlightening to look at these traces.
Keith Packard and I did this for our performance work some years ago. See: http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2003/ for a description of this. It is really worth downloading the tool for graphing the packet traces vs. time and look at what is going on; we traced a full gnome session startup. The code for the tools is available. A *wonderful* addition would be to add system call traces to the plots, and/or other kernel system traces. See http://www.opersys.com/LTT/ for one of the systems that is available for Linux. There is also very good tracing tools (non-invasive) available on Solaris. Some scripts to take such traces and combine them with the X traffic traces would allow one to see what is going on when applications aren't doing anything with X. These might then identify what is going on in the long periods of time that Gnome is doing nothing before things get started, though Nat may have identified Gnome-session as being particularly brain-dead. - Jim _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
