[PATCH] Make xfce4 start up faster

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Grant McWilliams wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 2:05 AM, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu>wrote:
> 
>> Hey all,
>>
>> In case people are interested in progress on this, I've posted a
>> preliminary patch to the bug Auke created[1] that implements parallel
>> startup in xfce4-session.
>>
>> It seems to work ok here (tho I haven't been brave enough to run it on
>> my desktop yet; just in a Xephyr sandbox), but I'm not entirely sure
>> everything will actually work properly.  Need to set up some clients
>> that fail and test how it handles them, etc.
>>
>> Anyhow, it could certainly use some testing -- one of the big things
>> now will be finding a good way to come up with a timeout value, since
>> the more apps that get started at once, the longer they'll take to get
>> to a point where they'll register with the session manager, so a
>> hard-coded timeout value (currently 8 seconds) may not be the best idea.
>>
>> But anyway, I think this might be a good first cut at really getting
>> this working.
>>
>> Give it a try... if you dare.
>>
>>        -b
>>
>> [1] http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4312
>>
>>
> Can we make sure there's a way of turning this off? In special cases I need
> one thing to start before another because the second has a dependency on the
> first. I guess the other way would be to have a script autostart which in
> turns starts the two thing synchronously.


Yes and no.  XSMP has a concept of startup priorities, which the current 
patch doesn't support at all.  I'd like to be able to support this by 
starting things in batches -- basically, for each prio level, start all 
the apps in that prio level, an wait for them to either register with 
the SM, or fail, and then move to the next prio level.  So, if you have 
apps that have ordering requirements, and set the SM priority property, 
then yeah, it'll work as you need it to.  Otherwise, it won't.

	-brian