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Wednesday December 07, 2005

GDM Performance Improvements

Here at the Sun GNOME Performance Summit we've had a few wins looking at GDM performance. The most significant improvement involves fixing the sockets protocol used to communicate between the client and the daemon so it doesn't tear down and re-open the socket connection each time a new command is accessed, and instead reuses the connection as much as possible. This resolves a performance problem that was recently added to the 2.13 branch - now the GDM slave processes use the sockets protocol to access configuration options, so the sockets protocol is used far more frequently. Also it was identified that GDM determiens what languages are on the system by stat'ing a hardcoded list of language directories in /usr/share/locale, and it would certainly be less I/O to more simply do a readdir and loop through the entries. These fixes should make it into CVS head soon, We've also been looking at how to make SMF on Solaris streamlined to make the boot time as short as possible.

Yesterday we had an ARC meeting and it was really interesting to hear John Plocher's visions regarding how the ARC process is evolving in relation to OpenSolaris. Although a lot of his ideas are not yet reflected on the OpenSolaris website, it was refreshing to hear that a lot of thought and consideration is going into making the process more open and less Sun-centric. For the process to be successful it has to be a process where the community can participate, and it seems that ARC is finally starting to really "get" this.