Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 134538
Enormous amount of disk activity upon login
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:50 EST
Description of problem: The summary says it all, really...there is a tremendous amount of disk activity going on when loggin in to a gnome desktop. When using a product by a certain redmond-based company there is no such activity, and the login process is thus much faster (and quieter) on that product. Suggestion: Something has to be done in this area. Maybe a common binary file could be used by all gnome applications for storing settings etc, resulting in only one diskread operation? Or maybe forcing applications to abandon custom .foo files and use gconf instead? Just some ideas.
Its a known issue, work has been done in the area and more work needs to be done. One example is the use of readahead(2) in order to pre-cache the files which we'll use on login. However, there's not much use in keeping this bug open - especially against this package: The gnome-desktop package contains an internal library (libgnomedesktop) used to implement some portions of the GNOME desktop, and also some data files and other shared components of the GNOME user environment. What we really need is targetted profiling of the disk activity and specific bugs logged on areas which can actually be fixed. Thanks for taking the time to log the bug, though