On Sun, Oct 07, 2012 at 04:51:11PM -0700, Timothy Arceri wrote: > Hi Guys, Hi Timothy,
> Due to time constraints I tend to limit my open source > contributions to resolve personal annoyances. Lately I've turned my attention > to the startup times on the Ubuntu Software Center which although is slightly > better than when it was first release still takes far to long to load on my > Netbook. > > > Anyway I'm tackling this one performance issue at a time and the first one > that has come to my attention is that the software center is slow to load a > Python pickle file that has been generated by apt-xapian-index. This file > simply contains a serialized python dictionary and therefore its possible to > use a more optimized serialization module than pickle. > > My suggestion is to replace pickle with msgpack which reduces load time (save > times are also increased using msgpack ) on my machine from 1.4 seconds to > 0.1 seconds also it reduces the filesize from 3.1MB to 1.7MB. Woah, that sounds like a pretty impressive improvement. Thanks a bunch for looking into this. > Obviously the drawback from my proposal is that it introduces a new > dependency: msgpack-python > Unfortunately we are too late for the 12.10 release as the new dependency needs to get a main approval first and get on the CD etc. But as soon as 13.04 opens we can switch > I have submitted a patch upstream to apt-xapian-index to make this change: > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=689717 Looks like Enrico did not have the time yet to look at this, I am happy to merge this myself, we may need a compatibilty pickle file for some time and also convert the old data over. But that is probably straightforward :) > Anyway I would appreciate some feedback on the likely hood of adopting this > improvement before I move on to tracking down further bottlenecks in software > center. I would certainly love to help with finding more bottlenecks. There is a bit of helper code availalbe: with ExecutionTime("description"): codeblock for example and "software-center --debug-filter=performance" should give some useful hints on areas that are slow. Cheers, Michael _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~software-store-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~software-store-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
