Sunday will be the GNOME Performance Love Day!
The idea was first proposed on the #performance channel, after seeing that some of the initial performance related issues were simply lacking a bitof man-power, and weren’t that difficult even for a beginner; mainly, at this point, lazy loading of shared modules inside the platform libraries, and the integrity checks inside private functions. Also, lack of profiling data on various machines/architectures is another issue when doing performance evaluation and regressions; if we can gather enough data on a GNOME release, on multiple platforms, we can actually become aware of regressions (in the worst case) or brag about us being faster in the next release (in the best case). As Federico wrote, the problem with performance is that you can’t simply make ${FOO} faster: you need to know how fast is going now, and how much your patches are actually making ${FOO} faster – or if they do at all.
So, if sunday you feel in the mood for profiling, hacking and learning more about the GNOME platform, jump aboard!