Comment 6 for bug 44002

I'm sure something can be done about this. I've just done an strace on the menu opening, it tries to do ~1500 file opens (most of which are for non-existent files).

First of all, most of those should be preloaded (actually, they should be cached once, then the cache should be preloaded in one step). The argument that it takes up memory doesn't hold, because the memory is still taken up the first time I open the menu.

Second of all, any refresh can be done incrementally. There's no reason to flush the entire menu and re-open 1500 files, when one or two might be new. And especially you don't need to do it on every boot.

Third, even a refresh could be done in parallel, with a "nice -n 10" to make sure things don't get unpleasant.

Last, I don't even get it why it has to read the entire menu. If I'm going for the package manager I have no reason to wait for th 1500 file accesses, when it fact I'm only going to see about 20 icons on the way.