Comment 3 for bug 876210

Hi Charles, and thanks for your bug report. Indeed, the startup time for Software Center has regressed significantly with the change to the new user interface in Oneiric. Rest assured that the developers are well aware of this issue and it annoys them as much as it does you. ;) This is in fact the top priority usability fix for us right now.

The good news is that we have a new version of Software Center, 5.0.2, currently undergoing the SRU process in oneiric-proposed, and this new version improves startup time quite significantly. On my machine, Software Center takes 11.2 seconds to launch with the current version 5.0.1.5, and with the 5.0.2 update it takes only 1.3 seconds to launch. For reference, the version of Software Center in Natty (with the old user interface) took about .5 seconds to launch on my machine, so we are much closer to closing this "regression gap" now in Oneiric.

If you would like to test version 5.0.2 for yourself while it is still in -proposed, please do so using the procedure described at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed, and let us know how it works for you.

You can get a measurement of startup time in 5.0.2 (and 5.0.1.5) by launching software-center from the terminal as shown (note that this is only useful for making the measurement; startup time will be reported in the terminal output but the application itself will not launch):

  software-center --measure-startup-time

I will leave this bug open as we continue to work on improving startup time.

Thank you again!