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Comment by voyou | Hacker News Reader

Why is the Unity dash so slow, and why does Canonical not seem to have any interest in speeding it up? Is it faster on their testing machines? Is it significantly faster on new hardware, if you're using an SSD, or if you have more than 4GB of RAM, or something? I quite like Unity generally, but the ridiculous slowness of the dash is a constant irritant.

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I suspect Canonical is playing the long game.

They know that the current generation of Linux desktop users may switch desktops or distros, but will just as easily switch back if Ubuntu trumps those.

For the broader audience, the Linux desktop is still not up to par with Windows or OSX, and that is Canonical's goal.

So basically, you're all just expendable guinea pigs, and all of your complaining is actually providing Canonical with cheap feedback.

Given that it's open source and we're not paying fuck all for it, I can't really say Canonical is doing it wrong.

I am running 12.04 on a machine with a SSD and 16GB of RAM and it works perfectly. I was not even aware people were having this problem until I read this post.

I have no problem on my personal laptop (i7, 8GB RAM, SSD), but on my work laptop (i5,6GB, HDD) it is horrible. I can wait up to 10 seconds before it appears... I just disabled the Super key binding on that computer.

HDD vs SSD would be my guess. I suspect it does a lot of disk accesses like loading icons, loading .desktop files, opening index, ...

Is it faster, when you open it the second time?

On a very slow netbook, I noticed that Unity 12.04 (LTS version) opens quicker on the second and subsequent invocation than on the first. However, there is still a significant delay. I suspect the searches and time taken to build the various lenses is the reason. Gnome Shell appears to be a lot snappier because the search does not happen on that first screen.

Does anyone remember Mac OS Spotlight? Took ages when first introduced (10.3?) then got loads faster on the same hardware. I'm hoping the same will happen with Unity.

I mainly use gnome-shell, but I fired up Unity on my Ubuntu 13.10 running Thinkpad T400 (~4 year old machine, core 2 duo) with 8 GB of RAM and a Samsung 840 pro SSD. the unity dash comes up instantaneously for me; certainly less than 1/2 a second. I'm guessing the SSD makes a big difference, as it does with all other computer performance issues. A 128GB MLC SSD costs less than $100 these days, and using one as your OS drive is by far the most incredible performance improvement you can make on a desktop machine.

I have a good machine with quad core processor, plenty of ram, and a very good GPU GTX675m, but it still lags like it is the first alpha version of Windows Vista.

it's a compiz plugin written in python. python is slow.

The dash itself is written in C++. It gets some of its data from python plugins, but a) not when it's searching for local files or applications, for which it uses services compiled to native code and b) there's no reason python should be slow for stuff that isn't hugely computation intensive like, say, searching a list of filenames. Whatever Unity's problem is, the choice of implementation language is not it.

Does it start a new interpreter every time you open it or something?

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