Comment 3 for bug 617418

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.)