Re: Slow application startup when using a theme

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 9 Jan 2012, at 19:59, Eric Wasylishen wrote:

> Hi,
> Thanks for the report, Philippe; this is indeed a fairly serious problem. :-(
> 
>> 
>> That would probably works but what about changing how +imageNamed:
>> works ?
>> 
>> When this method is called with a image name lacking an extension (ie
>> 'GNUstep' or 'common_arrowLeft'), it tries to find a existing file by
>> adding any know extension and calling a NSFileManager method, and this 3
>> times (main bundle, theme bundle and then every Images directory in the
>> system). With bitmaps existing only in the system directories this is
>> extremely costly as it tries something like 500 paths before the good
>> one. (And I know you understand all that, I'm just filling the blanks
>> for the others who might be interested, sorry :o)
>> 
>> Couldn't we inverse the thing and check if one of the existing file in
>> the directories has an extension known to be an image type ? I mean :
>> list the files in the main bundle, look for the ones with a matching
>> name (ie 'common_arrowLeft') and then check if the extension is none.
>> The list of file in a bundle could also be cached.
>> 
>> Worth trying ?
> 
> That sounds like a good idea.
> 
> Much of the overhead when using Neos is caused by the section of -[GSTheme 
> activate] which loads all images in the theme.
> 
> Here are some tests:
> startup Ink with default theme: 51k syscalls
> startup Ink with Neos.theme: 183k syscalls
> startup Ink with Neos.theme, with GSTheme.m lines 473 to 539 commented out: 
> 95k syscalls.
> 
> 
> Fred, even if we implement image filter services support and move the 
> ImageMagick support to a service, +[NSImage imageNamed:] would still do just 
> as much work because it uses [NSImage imageFileTypes], which would include 
> the types supported by filter services.
> 
> 
> How about adding caching to NSBundle? It already caches the budle info.plist, 
> why not the directory listing of the resource directory?

I hacked in some quick/dirty cacheing in NSBundle.  Does it make enough 
difference to be worth doing properly rather than reverting?