11.11. Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we determined why a particular component of an application had high latency (pop-up menus in nautilus). We figured out how to automate the creation of the pop-up menus (xautomation) and extend the amount of time that nautilus spent creating pop-up means (100 iterations). We used oprofile to figure out in which function nautilus was spending all of its time. We then used ltrace and gdb to determine which shared library calls were responsible for making all the calls. After we figured out which library calls were high cost, we tried to reduce or limit the number of times they were called. In this case, we stored a pointer to a new menu when it was allocated and used it later to avoid unneeded reallocations. We created a proposed patch and then ran our performance test against it to see whether performance improved. Performance improved, and functionality did not appear to be affected. The next step is to submit the patch to the nautilus developers for comment. Whereas this chapter focused on optimizing a single application's latency, the next chapter presents a performance hunt that concentrates on solving a system-level performance problem. This type of hunt can often involve investigating many different areas of the system, including hardware (disk, network, and memory) and software (applications, shared libraries, and the Linux kernel).