I like to keep myself honest by using slower computers regularly to do my job. When things become obnoxious, it reminds me to take a closer look at what’s going on.
Today, I did some more profiling of 45.beta with a not-too-old-but-still-a-bit-old laptop. It’s the first laptop I received at Red Hat in 2015. X1 Carbon gen3 (5th gen i7), with 8gb RAM. Not amazing by today’s standards, but still pretty good! Surely things will be fine.
Okay, so first up, after boot, I ssh in from my workstation so I can run sysprof-cli --session-bus --system-bus capture.syscap. Immediately afterwards, I type my login password and hit Enter.
Things are hanging for quite some time, what does Sysprof say?
Looks like we are spending most of our time decoding JXL images. Given that it took about 17 seconds to login, something is clearly going wrong here.
gdk-pixbuf-thumbnailer -s 256 adwaita-l.jxl test.png only takes about 3 seconds. So clearly there is more.
But first, we file an issue because we want to be logged in in about 500 milliseconds, not 15 seconds.
Up next we seem to be spending a lot of time in subdivide_infos() in … GTK CSS parsing. But more specifically, GTK 3 CSS parsing. Hrmm strange, what is GTK 3 that is loading at login? Apparently it’s all the gsd-* tools. And they’re GTK 3 still presumably from libcanberra-gtk or some other requirement. Cool.
Now here is the kicker, I remember putting in code years ago to avoid CSS parsing in these to specifically avoid this issue by creating a fake (and empty) GTK theme. I wonder why it’s not working. Maybe the transition from autotools to meson broke it.
After a bit of re-familiarizing myself with the code it looks like GTK will fallback to internal theme parsing if it can’t find the specified them from $GTK_THEME. Next we pop open gresources list gsd-media-keys to check that the theme resources are there, and indeed they are not. Quick patch to ensure linkage across static libraries and we’re off to the races. A bunch of time wasted in login shaved off and a couple dozen MB of memory reclaimed.