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Has Gimp done any work to parallelize plugin / font loading? I recall that was the bottleneck at startup. If they haven't then more cores won't ever help.
by wmil 6y ago
Has Gimp done any work to parallelize plugin / font loading? I recall that was the bottleneck at startup. If they haven't then more cores won't ever help.
- jeffbee 6y agoAccording to the article it’s the opposite: it gets slower as you add cores. I wonder if it’s better to launch it with `taskset -c 0-3` or similar.
- pdpi 6y agoI think that's consistent with it being singlethreaded. AIUI, unless you pin the process to a single core, scheduling can make it bounce around between cores, and the probability you'll land on a different core (and, thus, incur more cache sync issues) goes up with the number of cores.
- IanCutress 6y agoGIMP decides to optimize the plugins for each individual core in the system, so the complexity of startup increases with the number of cores present. It's a single threaded process, so more cores = takes longer. At least for the first startup when that happens anyway.
- StillBored 6y agoAs someone who submitted a patch a few years back to fix a gimp startup problem, I don't think they really care. The visual purity of seeing all those plugins loading, and having it take a long time seems to be part of the mystique they are looking for. If it just started right up, it wouldn't send the same message.
- PrototypeNM1 6y agoThey added lazy loading of fonts a couple years back, which took a chunk out of startup time.