This Week in GNOME and Christian Hergert on Sysprof

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 05, 2023,
updated Aug 05, 2023

• This Week in GNOME/Felix Häcker: #107 Reduced Overheads

  Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 28 to August 04.

• Christian Hergert: More Sysprof’ing

  GWeather

  Last time I wrote we talked about a new search index for libgweather. In the end I decided to take another route so that we can improve application performance without any changes. Instead, I added a kdtree to do nearest neighbor search when deserializing GWeatherLocation. That code path was looking for the nearest city from a latitude/longitude in degrees.

  The merge request indexes some 10,000 lat/lon points in radians at startup into a kd-tree. When deserializing it can find nearest city without the need for a linear scan. Maybe this is enough to allow significantly more data into the database someday so my small hometown can be represented.

  Nautilus

  I found a peculiarity in that I was seeing a lot of gtk_init() calls while profiling search. That means processes are being spawned. Since I have D-Bus session capture in Sysprof now, I was able to find this being caused by Nautilus sending an org.freedesktop.DBus.Peer.Ping() RPC to kgx and gnome-disks.