[TriLUG] fedora 7 & 8 slowness?

[Lance A. Brown]

Tim Jowers wrote:
>   Conclusion. Laptops have slow disks and todays applications do a lot of
> initialization at startup rather than being architected to do these things
> in a lazy bg thread or in a cached way. E.g. Firefox is 6K and my disk
> transfers at 55MB/s with hdparm; so, it "should" startup with a second or
> so. Where's the sloth? Clearly the hdparm read transfer time is far more
> optimistic than the real time to read Firefox from the disk. Talking to the
> X layer? Drawing the windows? Doing some update check to the web (this one
> should not be a differentiator as we compared apples-to-apples with
> Firefox)?

Firefox isn't, by any means, only 6K.  The script in /usr/bin is 6K, but 
it ends up firing up, eventually, firefox-bin, which is 127K and links 
into 42 different shared libraries on my centos5 box.  Some of those 
shared libs are firefox specific, as well, so they won't be in memory 
before firefox is run.

That just means even more files and more data to read into memory before 
firefox can start up properly.

--[Lance]

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