Sandy here are my thoughts on this:
> * We could let addins specify whether or not they need to be
> loaded/initialized at startup.
Yes, but the user should able to override this. A good place to put
this would be "Preferences > Add-ins"; add a checkbox (below
"information" button) which says "load on startup". This way when a
new addin is added the setting will be taken from the addin, but the
user can override if he wants.
> * We could store all notes in a sqlite DB to make querying faster (many
> users would hate this further obfuscation of their note data, though).
> Perhaps we could use a DB as a cache, though...
yes sqlite is fast, but I feel it would over complicate tomeboy, and
add more dependencies. the current, notes in xml is a clean and simple
scheme and we should keep it that way. However we need to avoid
loading up all these files at startup, and your next suggestion in
fact will do it.
> * We could store information about recently used notes, pinned notes,
> and previously open notes in a separate file instead of requiring
> ourselves to read it out of each note file.
since tomboy uses xml for everything, we can simply have a
recentinfo.xml file which will have the filenames of the latest notes
(by creation/modified time) + pinned notes + notes with reminders etc,
and loadup only those at startup. (and leisurely loadup the others).
this file will not grow along with usage, hence will take constant
time at startup. I think this is easier to implement without drastic
changes to existing code.
> I think that's the low hanging fruit here, but we'll need to do some
> measurements to be sure.
does tomboy have a log file? a simple log file with timestamped
entries will go a long way in debugging and identifying performance
bottlenecks.
I'll take a look at the code and see if I could help out; but as
everyone else is, I'm squeezed for time ;)
btw guys where are the preferences stored?
/usr/lib/tomboy/Tomboy.exe.config only has some dll info, and no other
config file in ~/.tomboy.
It would be great if there was a simple config.xml file which had
*all* the preferences and settings. the preferences window also should
take setting from it. that way everything will be very flexible, and
we can even have advanced tweaks in that file and not show them in the
preferences window (for the average user). eg: turn off hot-linking
(which I just can't stand!) ;)
--
Thank you.
Sampath Tilakumara
Software Engineer.
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:20 PM,
<
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> Today's Topics:
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> 1. Performance / scalability issue (Andreas Proschofsky)
> 2. Re: Performance / scalability issue (Sandy Armstrong)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:36:31 +0200
> From: Andreas Proschofsky <
suka@...>
> Subject: [tomboy-list] Performance / scalability issue
> To:
tomboy-list@...
> Message-ID: <1216481791.2810.11.camel@g-two>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Just some feedback: I really love tomboy and use heavily every day, I
> guess it's fair to say that it's really one of the few applications that
> change my workflow in a big way.
>
> But the heavy usage comes with quite a penalty nowadays: With currently
> 550 notes the startup of Tomboy takes 10s+ on the first start, even a
> "warm" start takes 6s here. Something which contributes in quite a big
> way to my login time. So actually this get's quite painful over time and
> I really don't want to start deleting old notes, I think having all
> those stuff around, easily searchable is one of the nicest things to
> have.
>
> Soooo. As I'm not a coder myself, I guess giving feedback is the best I
> can do. Still would be nice if this could get some priority in the
> future, as especially those using Tomboy the most are going to get bit
> by this more and more. Sorry for not having more to offer than feedback,
> though.
>
> bye
> Andreas
> --
> Andreas Proschofsky
> Gentoo Developer / OpenOffice.org
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:15:39 -0700
> From: Sandy Armstrong <
sanfordarmstrong@...>
> Subject: Re: [tomboy-list] Performance / scalability issue
> To: Andreas Proschofsky <
suka@...>
> Cc:
tomboy-list@...
> Message-ID: <
4882132B.6010303@...>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Andreas Proschofsky wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Just some feedback: I really love tomboy and use heavily every day, I
>> guess it's fair to say that it's really one of the few applications that
>> change my workflow in a big way.
>>
>> But the heavy usage comes with quite a penalty nowadays: With currently
>> 550 notes the startup of Tomboy takes 10s+ on the first start, even a
>> "warm" start takes 6s here. Something which contributes in quite a big
>> way to my login time. So actually this get's quite painful over time and
>> I really don't want to start deleting old notes, I think having all
>> those stuff around, easily searchable is one of the nicest things to
>> have.
>
> Thank you for the feedback. It is pretty easy to identify the
> performance issues in Tomboy (especially those related to startup), but
> unfortunately it is non-trivial to fix them. Let me paste in some
> thoughts I had on this in a private email recently:
>
> Work done when starting Tomboy:
>
> 1. Load any application-level addins, and initialize them (they may add
> features that must be usable as soon as Tomboy is started).
> 2. Register DBus.
> 3. Load all note files. This way there's no delay when the user clicks
> on the Tomboy icon, expecting to immediately see a list of most recently
> used notes (and those that are marked as "pinned"). In addition, any
> notes that were open when the user last quit Tomboy are re-opened when
> they start Tomboy. And...
> 4. Load all active addins for each note instance, and initialize them.
> I know this is starting to sound excessive, but we do have addins (like
> the reminder addin) that need to be ready and active, with access to
> note content, regardless of whether or not the user has opened any
> notes.
>
> > Can we defer some of this work until (much) later ? [ eg. when I
> > print ? or view a note that needs spell-highlighting ? ].
>
> Perhaps, but i really don't think that's what's making it so slow.
> Rather, it's probably steps 1, 3, and 4 I listed above. There are
> clearly ways we could optimize this.
>
> * We could let addins specify whether or not they need to be
> loaded/initialized at startup.
> * We could store all notes in a sqlite DB to make querying faster (many
> users would hate this further obfuscation of their note data, though).
> Perhaps we could use a DB as a cache, though...
> * We could store information about recently used notes, pinned notes,
> and previously open notes in a separate file instead of requiring
> ourselves to read it out of each note file.
>
> I think that's the low hanging fruit here, but we'll need to do some
> measurements to be sure.
>
>
> This is a widely-known problem, and something I would love to spend a
> few full days hacking on. Just need to find a few free days. :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Sandy
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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