What causes the long delays which switching or starting apps?

[lacriz]

I've noticed this as well. (It's hard not to!) My assumption has been that it's due to the low speed of eMMC and SD cards causing long load times.

I second your assumption. As mentioned in this forum, the eMMC has about 65 MB/s read speed.
For comparison, the built-in SSD memory of the iPhone SE 2nd gen has  - wait for it  -  439 MB/s read speed (german site )

I ran:

Code:

perf top

while starting up the gnome Maps app and by far the most frequent sys call (about 16% of all calls during startup - not accounting for how long each call takes [!] ) is:

Code:

do_lookup_x

which is the syscall used to load e.g. .so files etc. during startup.


To me this means the only chance to have faster-starting apps is to have apps which actually start faster (d'oh). Meaning it is not up to the distro or upstream, but it is up to the app devs to speed their apps up. A way to do that without having to change any code is to link the whole application statically. This results in a (way) larger application executable but gets rid of additional file i/o during app start.

For end users the only way to go for now seems to look for apps with smaller footprint and try them out.
I would love it if linmob or the mobian wiki would list the startup time, just roughly in seconds would be great!