Front page takes ~30 seconds to display

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

ubuntu-docs 10.04.3, Ubuntu Maverick alpha 3

1. Install Maverick, and log in for the first time.
2. Start your stopwatch as you click the Help launcher in the panel.

What happens: On this MacBook, the help viewer appears after about 6 seconds, but the help front page doesn't appear until about 30 seconds. This is way too long for someone wanting help.

What should happen: The front page should appear within 5 seconds.

On a second launch, Yelp and the front page both appear within about 2 seconds. So I'm guessing there's some kind of compilation or indexing that's going on at first launch, that should have been done already in the Ubuntu installation.

[dazza5000 (darran-kelinske)]

Dear Matthew,

Where exactly are you pressing the help button?

Darran

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The launcher in the panel.

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

Thanks for reporting this bug. I've spoken to Shaun McCance, the Yelp developer, about this on several occasions. IIRC, Yelp reads pretty much all of the files (XML, XSLT etc.) it might need for a session before it renders the first page. This causes a significant delay between clicking the Help icon and Yelp actually rendering the first page. We could rearrange ubuntu-docs a little and this might help reduce the waiting time, but Yelp would still be the main bottleneck.

The speed issue is fixed in Yelp 3 - it's much, much faster. I've been pushing Shaun for a GTK2 version of Yelp 3, since we won't be shipping GTK3 by default with Maverick (AFAIK). He's very busy though, so I don't know if a release will be available in time.

(P.S. I think a more useful target would be to have content displayed in ~1sec or less, and Yelp 3 should be able to deliver this. Help browsers need to give a good first impression, since users trust help files so little as it is.)

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

this is a long standing issue and a known one, bug 294182 is the one you're tracking for this, marking it as a duplicate.