Last week, Lars Lindner provided us with an early christmas gift when he announced that a new stable release of our beloved feed reader was now available. First, I would like to applaud him for his continued efforts over the years in maintaining this handy and high quality application. Many users like me have been patiently waiting for the 1.8 release in the hope that it would finally solve the infamous performance problems of the 1.4 and 1.6 series. However, while I can’t speak of the performance once the app is launched, the startup performance has not met my expectations (in some cases, it has regressed). This blog post is intended to share my findings (which I discussed with Lars) and to invite you to comment on possible solutions.
Here’s an introduction to the problem:
- An average Liferea user is expected to have hundreds of feeds and thousands of unread items (I have about 200 feeds and 2500 unread items). From discussions I’ve had, this is not considered excessive by Liferea standards.
- Liferea uses SQLite as a database for storing feed data into a single “liferea.db” file. Mine currently weighs 115 Mo in its vacuumed form. SQLite has this terrible tendency to suck because you need to vacuum (compact) it every once in a while or the performance degrades terribly. Firefox has the same problem.
- There also was ext4 as a suspect, although from all my tests on that matter in the 1.6 series, ext4 was definitely not the culprit. An ext3 partition had the same performance problems (or, at least, the same Liferea startup times).
Continue reading “Investigating Liferea's startup performance”
