Every once in a while I take a moment to test GNOME OS on physical hardware.
The experience today was quite a bit underwhelming. Fresh install, type a few characters into the search box, and things grind to a halt.
Being the system profiler author I am, where would I consider spending time to make this better? Here ya go, and please do help because I can make the tools but I need people like you to help go resolve them.
I had to build Sysprof from source quick on GNOME OS until new GNOME OS builds are out (soon).
$ sysprof-cli --session-bus --gnome-shell capture.syscap $ sysprof ./capture.syscap
Interesting, a couple systemd-coredump processes busy doing ztsd compression on Nautilus crashes (in search providers). Issue filed.
Next up, gnome-software clocking in at 23% CPU (and remember, we’re competing against multiple zstd compressors for CPU time) which is busy doing appstream search for Flatpaks. Seems a bit high for something which is pre-compiled into a binary format and mmap()d at runtime to reduce CPU and memory overhead. Issue filed.
Next is gnome-clocks at a whopping 15% to show me the time in cities near to whatever I type which is obviously “Riga” given GUADEC. Again, that’s 15% while competing with multiple zstd so in reality it’d be even more. Appears to be busy in libgweather doing deserialization, but specifically in finding the nearest city to a lat/lon position. A quick look at the code shows that this is probably one of the most expensive operations you can do and it’s done for every object deserialized. Probably could use some flags to avoid that from a search provider. Issue filed.
Lastly in our top-offenders list is gnome-characters search provider. It’s clocking in at roughly 10% of system time (again, would be more if not for zstd) filtering keywords and getting character names. Considering we’re only showing up to maybe 3 of these results that seems significantly high. Issue filed.
So I implore my readers to go and make things fast.
Additionally, to be a good citizen myself, I put together an MR that makes search in Characters much, much faster.
And some fixes to make libxmlb faster (Software) here and here.