"Running Shep", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With PermissionLast week we released Tomboy 0.14.2, a new stable release with a lot of fixes cherry-picked from the development branch. We remedied a couple of crashes, squashed some weird errors and behavior, and we even improved memory usage and start-up performance. Here are the highlights:
- Start Tomboy in 25% less time
- Fix random start-up crash on distros like Ubuntu 9.04
- Recognize presence of FUSE when built into kernel (not as module)
- Fix error when opening New Note Template on Ubuntu 9.04
- Stop seeing "this/that/other" as a file link (whoops!)
- Don't crash when opening invalid or improperly-formatted notes
- Better error-reporting on Windows
- Updated cross-platform documentation
- Updated translations
This start-up performance fix was also in 0.15.0, but I didn't realize how significant it was until after I'd already announced it. We found that this simple fix saved us around 25% on Tomboy start-up. On my system, start-up time was cut from 4 seconds to 3 seconds (these are warm starts, I did not have time to test cold starts).
These traces were created using Ruben's patch and Federico's graphing tool. You can click them to see the full graphs (note that apps run slower with tracing turned on). Compare the numbers for setting up our AddinManager in 0.14.1...
...versus the new numbers for 0.14.2...
The funny thing is, all I did was change a couple of lines in our Mono.Addins initialization code to reflect the latest recommendations of the maintainer.
This "free" boost isn't even part of the low-hanging fruit I keep talking about when it comes to Tomboy performance optimizations. I'm working on another fix that should cut down on memory consumption, too, and you should expect performance improvements in every release this cycle. If you would like to help us set up an automated way to track memory usage and start-up time in Tomboy, that would be an awesome contribution. :-)
Following the GNOME schedule, our next development release, Tomboy 0.15.1, is scheduled for May 25. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements!
This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.
