We’re about to finish the three days long first GNOME Performance Hackfest here in Cambridge.
We started covering a few topics, there are three major areas we’ve covered and in each one of those there has been a bunch of initiatives.
GNOME Shell performance
Jonas Adahl, Marco Trevisan, Eric Anholt, Emmanuele Bassi, Carlos Garnacho and Daniel Stone have been flocking together around Shell performance. There has been some high level discussions about the pipeline, Clutter, Cogl, cairo/gtk3 and gtk4.
The main effort has been around creating probes across the stack to help Christian Hergert with sysprof (in drm, mutter, gjs…) so that we can actually measure performance bottlenecks at different levels and pinpoint culprits.
We’ve been also looking at the story behind search providers and see if we can rearchitect things a bit to have less roundtrips and avoid persistent session daemons to achieve the same results. Discussions are still ongoing on that front.
GNOME Session resource consumption
Hans de Goede put together a summary of the resource consumed in a typical GNOME session in Fedora and tweaks to avoid those, you can check the list in the agenda.
There are some issues specific to Fedora there, but the biggest improvement that we can achieve is shutting down’s GDM’s own gnome-shell instance, for which Hans already has a working patch. This should reduce resource consumption by 280megs of RAM.
The second biggest target is GNOME Software, which we keep running primarily for the shell provider. Richard Hughes was here yesterday and is already working on a solution for this.
We are also looking into the different GNOME Settings Daemon processes and trying to figure out which ones we can shut down until needed.
Surely there’s stuff I’ve missed, and hopefully we’ll see blogposts and patches surfacing soon after we wrap up the event. Hopefully we can follow up during GUADEC and start showing the results.
On Tuesday we enjoyed some drinks out kindly hosted by Collabora.
I’d like to thank the Eben Upton and the Raspberry Pi Foundation for sponsoring the venue and sending Eric Anholt over.
Silicon Island 
Excellent, a lot of users will benefit and appreciate the performance improvements. And although Linux handles ram differently than Windows, all optimizations are welcome as we want Gnome running smoothly on the least common denominator.
I would like to put a word in for the future to add Gaussian blur to transparent backgrounds. As a designer, it can be critical to maintaining font legibility while designing sleek designs. I know that the designer community at large would appreciate it if that made it into GTK for use in CSS.
Great work @all 🙂
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Wow! The number 1 argument I’ve heard against GNOME though the years is performance. These improvements when in place will definitely make a lot of users much happier. Thank you folks, you are awesome ❤
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That’s a very nice agenda indeed.
Since Ubuntu switched from Unity to GNOME, my 4GB RAM laptop has reduced its capabilities. I’m glad to see it will change.
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Could you please share a pointer to the patch “the biggest improvement that we can achieve is shutting down’s GDM’s own gnome-shell instance, for which Hans already has a working patch” refers to?
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