Comment 9 for bug 360759

I was able to do a couple of low-risk things to greatly improve performance...

 1) Firstly, comment out the ionice and cpu nice calls in the screen-profiles-status wrapper. The idea is good, but this drastically slows down the initial launch of screen, which makes for a very bad experience, especially on low powered systems. I first noticed this playing with ARM. But also noted that on my high-powered laptop, screen's startup time was 1.5s vs. 0.5 seconds. I have a better approach for 'nice' on these status items in Karmic.

 2) The updates-available status is by far the slowest status item of all. I found a really neat, trivial approach to tremendously improve response time. Background the updates-available fetching and write these to a cache file, to be picked up at next run. We already support reading from cache file, so this is really a trivial fix.

 3) There was one superfluous call of lsb_release (surprisingly expensive) in the release script. Drop that.

All in all, very low-risk, high-yield fixes, IMHO.

:-Dustin