[PATCH] Make xfce4 start up faster

[Kok, Auke]

All, Brian,

Arjan and me are working on making Xfce4 start up faster. As you know perhaps
we're looking at having Xfce4 natively available or installed in the moblin2
distribution that we are currently working on, and startup time is a hot item.

One of the issues we've found is that xfce4-session waits for each process to
complete forking before starting the next part (xfdesktop, panel, thunar etc...).
This part is easily acceleratable and cuts down startup time quite a bit, from
like 2.5secs to 1.5secs or so, if not more.

Downside of this patch is that the splash screen is possibly off, but we are going
to completely disable the splash screen anyway since splash screens are evil and
waste time. I would even strongly suggest that Xfce as a whole disables the splash
screen by default: it takes longer to actually paint the throbbing mouse (hah!)
than it actually does to start up most of the xfce4 components.

Below patch does 2 things:
- parallellize session component startup
- disable startup notification for the terminal in case it was part of an
xfce4-session. (this is a more optional component but shows that if you exited
with a few terminals open you waste more time repainting the mouse cursor).

please check if the patch parts below are correct and can be perhaps improved on.
Comments welcome as usual :)


Cheers,

Auke





---
diff -purN xfce4-session-4.4.2/xfce4-session/xfsm-manager.c
xfce4-session-4.4.2.new/xfce4-session/xfsm-manager.c
--- xfce4-session-4.4.2/xfce4-session/xfsm-manager.c	2007-11-17 11:31:07.000000000
-0800
+++ xfce4-session-4.4.2.new/xfce4-session/xfsm-manager.c	2008-07-26
08:58:18.000000000 -0700
@@ -454,7 +454,9 @@ xfsm_manager_startup_continue (const gch
         return;
     }

-  startup_done = xfsm_startup_continue (previous_id);
+  startup_done = FALSE;
+  while (!startup_done)
+    startup_done = xfsm_startup_continue (previous_id);

   if (startup_done)
     {
diff -purN xfce4-session-4.4.2/xfce4-session/xfsm-startup.c
xfce4-session-4.4.2.new/xfce4-session/xfsm-startup.c
--- xfce4-session-4.4.2/xfce4-session/xfsm-startup.c	2007-11-17 11:31:07.000000000
-0800
+++ xfce4-session-4.4.2.new/xfce4-session/xfsm-startup.c	2008-07-25
23:30:57.000000000 -0700
@@ -374,7 +374,7 @@ xfsm_startup_autostart_xdg (void)
           terminal = xfce_rc_read_bool_entry (rc, "Terminal", FALSE);

           /* try to launch the command */
-          if (!xfce_exec (exec, terminal, startup_notify, &error))
+          if (!xfce_exec (exec, terminal, 0, &error))
             {
               g_warning ("Unable to launch \"%s\" (specified by %s): %s", exec,
files[n], error->message);
               g_error_free (error);