Using Time Where You Have It

December 9, 2005 9:29 am General

It’s probably a basic principle of performance work. Use time where you have it, take time away where you don’t. No brainer. The approach is probably slightly less trivial, but some of the stuff we did today was pretty obvious. During the week we were experimenting with a whole bunch of pre-loading work testing out a series of cold and warm start scenarios.

And suddenly it was like, duh, why don’t we try and page in the libraries during the login experience? But doesn’t that use up time during the login? Well, no, because there’s a time slice between when the login screen pops up and when the user has entered their username and password. It’s all about making use of time cleverly. Doing a preload in the /etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default script of a whole bunch of libraries seems to shave off about 3 or 4 seconds from the login time. A simple win with no visible regressions, and there’s probably wins where that came from.

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