Software Centre is the most horrible, bloated and slow application I have ever used.

[Aidan Fell]

The title explains it all.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: software-center 5.0.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-13.21-generic 3.0.6
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-13-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: c8f492d129becc27db8b0d9223313dfc
CheckboxSystem: b845c366ea09c60efa3a45c1b5b21525
Date: Sun Oct 30 07:31:55 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: software-center
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-14 (15 days ago)

[Alessandro Menti (elgaton)]

Hi,
could you please specify which features you consider "horrible" (or have trouble using) and/or how you'd like Software Center to be improved, so that we'll be able to listen to your suggestions?
Thanks.

[Aidan Fell (islandmonkey)]

Well, it's slow doing just about everything. It takes a very long time to start up, a very long time to install things, a very long time to install .deb files and a very long time to - well...you get the point.

[Alessandro Menti (elgaton)]

Could you please try to install an application using the terminal (choose an application you wish and install it with the command "sudo apt-get install appname" where "appname" is the name of the package containing the application), just to make sure that the Software Center itself is the main cause of the problem (and not just an unresponsiveness caused by the Debian package infrastructure that handles installation)?

Please tell me if you notice any differences in time and, if possible, list here the complete configuration of your system (CPU, amount of RAM, swap size...).

If there is no noticeable difference in time, you may want to try installing the apt-xapian-index package - basically, it replaces the text file handling mechanism used by dpkg to fetch and query package information with a more efficient database one. Be wary that the program may consume resources when it's translating the traditional package lists to the database format; searches in the Software Center should be faster, though.

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi Jamie, thanks for your report. Indeed, there is no question that Software Center in Oneiric is much slower than that in Natty. Many of these slowdowns were an unintended side effect after we moved to a brand new UI. Don't worry, we are not settling for this, we simply need to optimize things to make them fast again. I can assure you that speeding up Software Center is a top priority of the Software Center team for the Precise cycle. And as we make improvements, we will SRU them as much as possible to Oneiric.

Please check bug 876210 for details as we do this work. I know that that bug mentions startup time specifically, but the performance improvements we will be making span everywhere in the app where things are plain TOO slow.

Thanks again!
Gary

[Aidan Fell (islandmonkey)]

The apt-get command installs OpenShot fairly quickly. Software Centre: Slow.

Anyhow, here's some misc. details:

CPU: Intel Celeron T3100 x2 @ 1.9 GHz
RAM: 2.9 GB
Swap: The same as memory.

Oh, reading from gnome-system-monitor, Software Centre takes up about 25% of my CPU and 150 MB (yes I know it should be MiB but I'm not bothered). It's probably taking up 50% now, from what I can hear.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

If this bug report is to become useful, it will need to:
(a) focus on a specific slow operation (otherwise it's just a duplicate of the invalid bug 641899), an operation that isn't startup (bug 876210), installation (bug 869470), or showing the History (bug 879185);
(b) measure current performance (more precisely than "fairly quickly" and "slow");
(c) set a target (otherwise we won't have a way of telling when it should be marked fixed).

[Aidan Fell (islandmonkey)]

Software takes about 8 seconds to load up.

[Aidan Fell (islandmonkey)]

Sorry, Software Centre.

[Alessandro Menti (elgaton)]

@Jamie: As Matthew and Gary pointed out, there is already some work in progress on each front. Specifically, if you are focusing on the Software Center startup time, the developers are already aware of that (see bug #876210). (A new version of Software Center will be made available as soon as it is improved).

I had a look at that report and it seems fairly complete. If you want to focus on other issues, please write them here, otherwise I'll consider this report a duplicate. (Sorry if I may seem a bit harsh - it is not intended).

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi again Jamie. The Software Center devs have just returned from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando and we have identified the work that we plan to do this cycle. Performance (and in particular, startup performance), is at the top of the priority list for improvement in Precise. We have also identified other areas that need speed improvement, and will address those as well.

You can see our current session notes and track our development plan is we refine it over the next week or so at this blueprint:

  https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/consumer-p-software-center-enhancements

Please also note the startup time charts that we are maintaining and using to monitor our progress in this area (as linked from the blueprint above). These measurements are measured on our chosen reference hardware Dell Mini 10, which is a fairly low-powered machine.

For Natty, you can see that we were at about ~3s for startup:

  http://people.canonical.com/%7Emvo/software-center/mini10-startup/startup-times.png

And for Oneiric (and currently Precise), we are currently at ~7s with the 5.0.2 release (SRU) there:

  http://people.canonical.com/%7Emvo/software-center/mini10-startup/start-times-oneiric.png

If you take a look at the second graph, you can see that at revision 2516 in software-center trunk we were at about 34s startup (!). This was the version that was released with Oneiric final. Note the improvement immediately after at revision 2517 that brings it to about 10s, and then improves to about 6-7 seconds from there. The software-center version 5.02 SRU in Oneiric includes this improvement.

At this point I'll mark this bug a duplicate of bug 876210, as that is where we will continue to track this issue. Please be sure to keep an eye on that bug and add comments and your impressions at any time. We'd love to hear from you so that we can be sure that the speedups as we make them are noticeable for you and that they make your experience using Software Center better. That's our goal!

Thank you for your help!

Best regards,
Gary