Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Cycled H. to school; poked at mail - delved into autobuild. Fixed a couple of rather critical yast2 bugs, Rodrigo kindly volunteered to add them to autobuild.
Looked at reports of poor performance on OO.o startup; finally found an area where strace makes a noticeable difference to performance: javaldx. The purpose of javaldx is to (cunningly) grope your system - to look for performance-enhancing java goodness: here are some stats:

syscalls 182000

of which lstat64's 161000

normal (warm) start 0.74 secs

under strace 11.7 secs

strace log size 17Mb

Of course, we like to re-stat the same place a good few times, presumably we don't trust the kernel that much: 51k stats of /usr, 14k of /usr/lib, 13k of /home etc. sigh. Perhaps the frenzy is just revenge for not having any java on the live-CD system.
Chased my nautilus (non) re-thumbnailing issue a little. Wrote an ical scrubbing script, and sent calendar data off to Federico; more bug pokeage.
Booted opensolaris in KVM (eventually) - though it was clearly not a happy operating-system with only 512Mb of virtual RAM; despite having ~the whole live-CD in Linux' page-cache. Tried to get to the root account: no sudo; su - prompts for a non-obvious password; interestingly vs. openSUSE's 11.0' LiveCD there is no OpenOffice included; odd. Interesting to poke at baobab to see the size breakdown of the live-cd - odd to have 130Mb of fonts included, and nothing much to use them; Solaris suffers from the gconf.xml.defaults malaise too - of ramming tons of translations into a single file: when will the world stop doing this: 50Mb of irrelevance ?
Deciced to race the install in with an identical VM with openSUSE (1 CPU each) - apparently both do an image copy. Started openSUSE at 67% of opensolaris, got bored enough that when I came back at 84% of opensolaris, OS11.0 install was long finished, re-booted & did the post-install setup; overall OpenSUSE at least 3x faster to install, prolly more. Unfortunately, having not created a user account, and given a blank root password - I can't log in; hey ho. Persuaded to file my opensolaris bugs - at least they run a recent version of bugzilla there, in contrast to OO.o.

syscalls	182000
of which lstat64's	161000
normal (warm) start	0.74 secs
under strace	11.7 secs
strace log size	17Mb

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In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2008-05-12: Monday