#60 Long startup time

On the first beta of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) starting checkgmail takes a long time (about 30 seconds), while on 7.10 it was virtually instantaneous.
When checking in htop the process (/usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/checkgmail) takes up a lot of CPU, up to 100%.
Starting with or without the profile parameter or with a new profile doesn't change anything.

My checkgmail version is svn revision 27.
My perl version is 5.8.8.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

same problem here

[oskar andersson]

Logged In: YES
user_id=969797
Originator: NO

Same problem for me too

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

Same problem.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

Same problem here...

[Tim Jones]

Looks like a translations thing. Removing all but the English translations before lang.xml removes the startup delay.

[Anonymous]

I'm not familiar with perl so I've just done some simple print-debugging. Every XMLin-operation takes ~5 seconds on my machine and the op. is called four times so we end up with ~20 seconds till the app is started (same goes for opening and closing preferences).

Shouldn't XMLin be much faster? There ARE a lot of translations but that's still not much data...

[Anonymous]

After some reading I changed the backend for XML::Simple to XML::Parser by adding

$ENV{XML_SIMPLE_PREFERRED_PARSER} = 'XML::Parser';

after line 44 to the first BEGIN-block. Now it starts as fast as it did before.

[Anonymous]

I'm sorry to spam this report (can't edit). Just wanted to add this link

http://search.cpan.org/~grantm/XML-Simple-2.18/lib/XML/Simple.pm#ENVIRONMENT

"XML::Simple will default to using a SAX parser if one is available or XML::Parser if SAX is not available. [...] Note: The XML::SAX distribution includes an XML parser written entirely in Perl. It is very portable but it is not very fast."

So I guess XML::Simple defaults to this slow perl parser if the backend isn't explicity set.

[Anonymous]

Ubuntu Intrepid, changelog of libxml-sax-perl, version 0.16+dfsg-1:

* Add support for SAX parser priorities.
+ lower the XML::SAX::PurePerl priority so that it will not be the
default parser anymore if any others are available. (Closes: #430118)

Ubuntu Hardy comes with libxml-sax-perl 0.16-0.1, case closed. :P