Application startup times in SailfishOS

asked 2019-10-03 20:01:57 +0200

szopin
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As demonstrated in a recent video comparison on same HW (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMkpLcvZUew) it seems silica apps take significantly more time to load than android counterparts. One app seems to load almost instantly - gallery. Rest go through a rather long (0.7-2s) loading animation before starting. Not sure if gallery has some components preloaded in memory that allowed it to be the only app to tie, just curious as apps like clock are pure qml with minimal storage usage, yet they also take a considerable time to load. As most phones now ship with >2Gb ram maybe an option to pre-load base qt libs (or whatever makes gallery open up so quick) should be an option? IIRC n900 had something like that for dialer and browser as most common apps expected to be used often, but not 100% sure.

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I would try with a patch that makes the animation shorter if it helps to improve the situation: https://github.com/cornerman/sailfishos-patch-less-home-animations

Seems that SFOS animates into the homescreen, displays the running window tile and only then runs the application. I could be wrong but that seems to me based on the video.

salarelv ( 2019-10-03 22:04:56 +0200 )edit

The homescreen -> spawn cover animation is like 0.2 seconds, even if you cut it out completely we end up with 0.5-1.5s overhead for some apps (with even basic qml apps around 0.5s). Check how quickly the gallery app starts in the video even with the homescreen and cover spawning animations, it skips the circle loading completely, which leads me to the conclusion it had either parts preloaded or... idk, extremely well optimised app, doubtful

szopin ( 2019-10-03 22:10:51 +0200 )edit

Probably the 'booster [silica-media]' process from mapplauncherd is responsible for shorter startup of the gallery app, still weird for clock app to launch so slowly if you ldd jolla-clock and jolla-gallery, the latter uses twice as many libs, maybe the boosters need updating

edit: nope, both use silica-qt5 as invoker, only camera seems to use silica-media

szopin ( 2019-10-04 15:06:04 +0200 )edit

answered 2019-10-04 16:31:58 +0200

szopin
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updated 2019-10-04 16:41:08 +0200

So it turns out we can manually speed up loading times of apps, tested with jolla clock app, added (from mainpage.qml of the clock app):

import Sailfish.Silica.private 1.0
import com.jolla.settings.system 1.0
import org.nemomobile.notifications 1.0

and TabView {} further down close to silicagridview, to preload.qml in /usr/share/booster-silica-media and made a copy of jolla-clock.desktop to use that as invoker instead of the standard silica-qt5, result is faster startup time, the loading animation finishes with the highlighted part of circle reaching 3 o clock, while normal invoke with silica-qt5 goes to 6 (as it starts around 9 that's close to 33% increase on the loading animation)

edit: question would be on the impact of adding extra imports to main silica-qt5 preload.qml on memory (camera is the only app using silica-media booster and seems to load more or less the same quickly as before, though I could be wrong, still expecting memory usage of the 'booster [xyz]' processes to be main tradeoff)

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Would be possible to implement this improvement during this year? How to make Jolla aware of this?

d ( 2020-01-27 18:16:21 +0200 )edit

Maybe bring this up as a topic for next community meeting? The thread is so old upvoting is unlikely to help I'm afraid, it will just linger in the back catalog no matter how many points it gets

szopin ( 2020-01-27 18:50:46 +0200 )edit

Application startup times in SailfishOS

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