Martin Schlander wrote:
And the application startup difference is really huge, the first time I started Firefox on Mandriva I was litterally in disbelief thinking "what the f...?!?" .. usually starting Firefox means it's time to go get some coffee.
Knowing how much stuff Mozilla applications (like Firefox) load at startup, I wonder as much as coolo if they preload it if it's _that_ snappy. One other possible difference is a different version. Does ubuntu 9.04 already include a Firefox 3.1/3.5 beta or still 3.0.x? Because startup speed is/was once of the major problems with the mobile Firefox version codenamed "Fennec", our Mozilla platform guys did put a lot of work into improving startup speed recently, and Firefox 3.1/3.5 should include a lot of that work while 3.0.x doesn't. Also, looking at the buildconfig flags reported in the Firefox 3.5b4 I have in Factory, the list looks somewhat excessive and could maybe be cleaned up, though I don't think stuff listed there makes any significant speed difference. I wonder if the ubuntu guys have found something to do that makes file system access faster, or is it just the newer kernel? I remember that back in the days when SUSE was the only distro using reiserfs by default, it was know to be faster than others, but right now everybody is on ext3 by default, I think, so that should be a level terrain in theory... In any case, comparing a distro from last year to a very current one is somewhat unfair, I'd be interested in ubuntu 9.04 vs. openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 2 (or current Factory), even though in this case our stuff is newer. Might be interesting to have some automated test machines at Novell that regularly would time a number of common operations on a default install, maybe in comparison with 2-3 other distros. Mozilla is doing that on an application level and very critically looking at every regression and improvement of the numbers to be sure of the causes and possibly not making things worse. Robert Kaiser -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org