F8/9 6-16x slower than XP to boot

[Dimi Paun]

On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 13:48 +0100, Lubomir Kundrak wrote:
> 
> Not to devaluate your tests -- please bear in mind that we offer more
> features and are much more secure than XP. I am wondering what the
> results would be if you kickstarted fedora just with icewm and firefox
> and compared that one.

They will be better, but I don't think by much -- it takes almost 1.5min
just to get to the point were we start GNOME, IceWM can't go back in
time. :)

And what features can we offer that we are willing to pay by an order
of magnitude in performance? (Firefox after boot in XP starts in 2-3s,
whereas in Fedora it takes 25-28s!).

The danger here is that we make ourselves feel better and ignore the
problem by saying we offer more features. 600% slower to start! I
remember the days back in 99 or around there, when Windows came on top
in performance. For months we tried to blame it on biased tests, etc.
Then the kernel folks got their act together and fixed the problem.

The same must happen here, and the first step is to acknowledge it.
This is a much more difficult problem I think then the other one,
and I'm afraid that RedHat is the only one capable to solve it (because
they employ enough key people in all the right places:
kernel/glibc/toolchain/GNOME). This is similar in the way to good thread
support that required tricky changes in kernel/glibc/toolchain.

Hey, come to think of it, we need Ingo to look at it! :)

I'm not even sure where the problem lies. Is PE inherently faster than
ELF? Is it the on-demand paging of apps that is done in the kernel under
Windows responsible for that much faster startup times? Do they have
that much better compilers/linkers? Or maybe better preloading from
disk? 

I personally think a key piece in the puzzle is why is Firefox so
darn slow to load under Linux when compared to Windows?

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.