[scribus] Opening a scribus file faster

[Luya Tshimbalanga]

On 25/12/16 02:35 PM, William Bader wrote:
> Hi Luya,
>
> I use git more than svn. I think that the revision number with 'svn-bisect after' should be an existing revision that is known to be bad (i.e. has the problem of being slow).
>
> If svn-bisect isn't working, I think that you can do the same with a binary search using 'svn co'. The bisect command just takes care of the paperwork.
Thanks for the tip.
> That looks more like an issue with opening files than with the user interface.  Scribus and many other applications open a lot of files when they start. On a cold start, the operating system has to read all of those files from the disk. When you restart the application, if the operating system has kept the files in cache, the application will open much faster.
Correct. It is an issue with opening files with linked images. Could it
be adjusting the
image cache for optimization?

> You can capture the file opens with an strace command like
>
>   strace -e open scribus > scribus.log 2>&1
>
> When I do that on Fedora 23 with Scribus from SVN 21652, 'grep open scribus.log | wc' shows 4775 open attempts, and 'grep '^open' scribus.log | grep -v ENOENT | wc -l' shows 3125 successful opens. That could be slow on a cold start if you don't have an SSD.
Result with 'grep open scribus.log | wc':
4927   22021  447949

Result with 'grep '^open' scribus.log | grep -v ENOENT | wc -l'
4598

The storage is a HDD so it appears normal.
>
> If you have an older version of Scribus that is faster on cold starts, you could check how many files it opens.
>
> The command line below shows the most frequently accessed directories.
>
> grep '^open' scribus.log | grep -v ENOENT | sed -e 's,^open(",,' -e 's,\(.*/\).*,\1,' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r | less
>
> Here is my top 10.
>
>     876 /u/william/.local/share/scribus/scrapbook/
>     240 /usr/share/fonts/
>     216 /lib64/
>     210 /etc/fonts/conf.d/
>     191 /usr/lib64/GraphicsMagick-1.3.25/modules-Q16/coders/
>     135 /var/cache/fontconfig//
>     118 /usr/local/share/scribus/icons/1_5_1/16/
>      92 /usr/local/share/scribus/icons/1_5_1/22/
>      89 /usr/lib64/osgPlugins-3.2.3/
>      80 /usr/local/share/scribus/icons/1_5_1/
>
> Scribus scans /u/william/.local/share/scribus/scrapbook/main/ and /u/william/.local/share/scribus/scrapbook/tmp/ a lot of times.
980 /home/luya/.local/share/scribus-1.5.3.svn/scrapbook/
252 /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/cursors/
231 /lib64/
196 /etc/fonts/conf.d/
191 /usr/lib64/GraphicsMagick-1.3.25/modules-Q16/coders/
159 /home/luya/.local/share/fonts/
128 /var/cache/fontconfig//
121 /usr/share/scribus-1.5.3.svn/icons/1_5_1/16/
120 /usr/share/fonts/
79 /usr/share/scribus-1.5.3.svn/icons/1_5_1/

It seems a normal behaviour after analyzing the report. Thanks for the
guidance. I will look at adjusting the image cache.
-- 
Luya Tshimbalanga
Graphic & Web Designer
E: luya at fedoraproject.org
W: http://www.coolest-storm.net