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Ben Goodger wrote: | | Did anyone read the GNOME story where somebody found out GNOME was | reading a 200k XML file at startup just to set the system volume? It's | these kinds of silly things -- and lots of them -- which really cause | the slowdown and poor performance in juggernauts such as GNOME and | //shudder// KDE.
Although it doesn't surprise me. In big projects it is often hard to find the "right way" TM to do something, so people do the best in the time they have.
The problem is cleaning this up is not terribly exciting, and leads to lots of dull tasks like checking the memory allocation. And in the end of the day the reward for the developer is another 0.1 seconds of his load time (and he probably has a huge machine that can handle it anyway to speed compiles).
You can readily handle this kind of thing in professional development, if the management want it, proper code inspection procedures work.
The difficult thing can be deciding on the compromises of memory for features. The point is 200Kbytes were wasted and no one noticed because 200Kbytes is now small beer and if it is not used it is paged off to swap when the memory is needed for something important.
The telling comment, backdrop images take 13MB in NLD. A lot of what we lose these days is eye candy, or "user friendliness" gone mad, which is how I can do stats on 100,000 records of Squid log almost instantly on a box with a busy squid cache, and serving email, and webpages from Apache, via the command line, where as a similar era box takes 15 seconds to open the KDE filemanager, whilst it displays a zillion thumbnails, and tries to create "mini-icons" of the files real content for CSV files and the like.
Thing is people really like a lot of those "user friendly" features, even if they make it slow, insecure, and unreliable. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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