The Hunt for Rogue Time – How we investigated and solved the Chromium snap slow startup problem
In October, we shared a blog post detailing significant snap startup time improvements due to the use of a new compression algorithm. In that article, we focused on the cold and hot application startups, but we did not delve much into the first-run setup scenario. While running our tests, we observed a rather interesting phenomenon, primarily on the Fedora 32 Workstation system. On a particular laptop, we noticed that the initial snap launch took about 60 seconds, whereas cold launches would take about 10 seconds. We decided to analyze this problem, and once we did, we realized there’s an amazing investigative story to be shared, including some really cool findings and general advice for developers on how to optimize their snaps. First-run startup time It is important to note that the difference (6x) was what drew our eye – rather the actual numbers, as these are highly dependent on the platform capabilities and software in question. For that matter, 6-second and 1-second launch ti...