GNOME Software Center Loads 50% Faster in GNOME 40

GNOME 40 was an exciting release and many users still haven’t tried it out because you can only get it with Fedora 34 beta or by trying GNOME OS.

Of course, you can experiment with it when it pops up in the default repositories, but I’ll recommend you to wait for distributions to test and push it with an update.

Even though we discussed a lot of good things about GNOME 40 release, there are still a few things worth appreciating.

Improvements to GNOME Software is one of them.

Let’s face it – GNOME Software isn’t the fastest experience out there. But, with GNOME 40, it looks like the startup time for GNOME Software has decreased by more than 50%.

That’s definitely impressive! Let’s take a look at what it is all about?

Performance Improvements in GNOME Software with GNOME 40

A GNOME contributor (Philip Withnall from Endless Foundation) recently published a blog post explaining GNOME Software performance in GNOME 40, and I was impressed to see it mention a decrease of 52% in startup time!

The startup time is always crucial for anything, be it your system or an application.

So, that’s definitely a good thing. But, how did they achieve it? Is there anything else that has been planned for GNOME Software?

Let me briefly describe you what it is all about without any serious technical jargon (I’ll try!).

GNOME Software loads up several XML Queries when it starts up. In other words, it needs to load up a bunch of information to display apps to the user.

It takes time to load data to an application before starting up. But, this time, it looks like the developers have managed to speed up the time and reduce the number of queries at startup, which significantly reduced the startup time.

As per the blog post, the startup time came down from 25 seconds to 12 seconds, interesting!

Here’s what the blog post mentions about it:

Overall, after all the performance work in the GNOME 40 cycle, startup time has decreased from 25 seconds to 12 seconds (-52%) when starting for the first time since the silo changed. This is the situation in which gnome-software normally starts, as it sits as a background process after that, and the silo is likely to change every day or two.

You can read all the technical details in the blog post if you’re curious.

There are also plans to stop GNOME Software from running in the background, but it would require the app to have a crazy fast startup time of about 1-2 seconds.

But, if they’ve done this, I’m positive that we will be seeing a crazy performance boost probably in the next GNOME release cycle.

What do you think about this performance boost? Feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments below.