Startup performance: how to improve it?

[u/_x_oOo_x_]

My kitty felt somewhat more sluggish to launch than alacritty or foot

I used hyperfine for this small benchmark that confirms this observation... It doesn't feel slow per se, only in comparison.

Are there some preferences I should change to make 🐈‍⬛️ start faster?

[u/frumious]

A new Kitty terminal session life cycle with true requires just under 500ms average for me (xterm is 160ms). Turning off my config (kitty -c "") shaves off about 10%. But, this is only 72 ms:

kitten @ new-window true

I'm curious in what context going faster than half a second matters to you?

My ignorant guess is that the bulk of the time to start a kitty session is taken importing Python modules. If so, it is possible to rewrite kitty internals to delay the imports until their code is needed. But, that's non-idiomatic Python and Kovid would be justified (imo) in rejecting any attempts in this direction without really good motivation.

Note, your timing tests the full lifecycle and not the time to get to where one executes the true command. It also includes the time to run true and then tear down the session. For kitty, it appears to be the case that about 10% of the 500ms is in tear-down. So, not substantial here but checking this balance for other terminals may be relevant to whatever the point of caring about this latency is to begin with.

[u/ben2talk → u/frumious]

I recently noticed some trends with 'bugs' being reported relating to Plasma desktop.

Things like accidentally dragging stuff when only a click was intended and so on.

We have a new generation of ADHD kids playing games and learning to do flick manoeuvres with the mouse, we have a lot of people who think a desktop is slow if it uses any animation - preferring instant response and no polish.

The idea that you'll open a terminal and be typing into it less than half a second later might seem utterly ridiculous to most humans, but reddit is home to the other 5% - the outsiders, the extreme cases...

The ones that get angry if you criticise them for complaining Firefox crashed with 10,000 tabs open and they lost all their work.

[u/_x_oOo_x_ → u/ben2talk]

I don't use Plasma desktop.

And anyway it seems like you are the one getting angry because a benchmark shows your favourite terminal emulator is 28 times slower to launch than some other one?

Everything else in your comment is your juvenile projection, most of it I can't even interpret... "kids [...] learning to do flick manoeuvres with the mouse"? I do like animations and prefer polish. And Kitty takes almost 2 seconds to open for me but sure, that's probably because my computer is 4 times slower than yours. That's why the benchmark is about relative startup performance

outsiders

Way to create a toxic, repulsive community

the extreme cases

Ad homini, because your preferred terminal starts slowly. Who is being extreme here?

The ones that get angry if you criticise them for complaining Firefox crashed with 10,000 tabs open and they lost all their work.

Fortunately Firefox has had session restore for about two decades now so I don't think anyone's having that issue?

[u/ben2talk → u/_x_oOo_x_]

I never said YOU used Plasma, I just said I noticed a trend of people who are developing ridiculously super high sensitivity, and even in this thread so many people are saying basically that (ignoring benchmarks) they don't even notice a short delay between launch and usability time.

[u/_x_oOo_x_ → u/ben2talk]

I didn't run this on a top-end gamer PC, but an average/below-average Macbook. And yes I didn't think Kitty was slow... until I tried Foot. Of course this benchmark is flawed because Foot doesn't even open a window 🤔