software-store-developers team mailing list archive

[Timothy Arceri <t_arceri@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Guys,
            Due to time constraints I tend to limit my open source contributions to resolve personal annoyances. Lately I've turned my attention to the startup times on the Ubuntu Software Center which although is slightly better than when it was first release still takes far to long to load on my Netbook. 


Anyway I'm tackling this one performance issue at a time and the first one that has come to my attention is that the software center is slow to load a Python pickle file that has been generated by apt-xapian-index. This file simply contains a serialized python dictionary and therefore its possible to use a more optimized serialization module than pickle. 

My suggestion is to replace pickle with msgpack which reduces load time (save times are also increased using msgpack ) on my machine from 1.4 seconds to 0.1 seconds also it reduces the filesize from 3.1MB to 1.7MB.

Obviously the drawback from my proposal is that it introduces a new dependency: msgpack-python 


I have submitted a patch upstream to apt-xapian-index to make this change: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=689717

Anyway I would appreciate some feedback on the likely hood of adopting this improvement before I move on to tracking down further bottlenecks in software center.

Thanks for your time,
Timothy Arceri

Launchpad bugs:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+bug/845579
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt-xapian-index/+bug/1063113