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Blog posts tagged "speed"

Canonical’s recipe for High Performance Computing

In essence, High Performance Computing (HPC) is quite simple. Speed and scale. In practice, the concept is quite complex and hard to achieve. It is not dissimilar to what happens when you go from a regular car to a supercar or a hypercar – the challenges and problems you encounter at 100 km/h are vastly

High Performance Computing – It’s all about the bottleneck

The term High Performance Computing, HPC, evokes a lot of powerful emotions whenever mentioned. Even people who do not necessarily have vocational knowledge of hardware and software will have an inkling of understanding of what it’s all about; HPC solves problems at speed and scale that cannot be achieved with standard, traditional comput

How to make snaps faster

A great user experience is (or at least, should be) an integral part of any software that involves user interaction. On the desktop, this starts with the application launch, and continues through the session. The overall time to completion of tasks as well as interactive responsiveness are a core element in this journey. If you’re

Snap Performance Skunk Works – Ensuring speed and consistency for snaps

Snaps are used on desktop machines, servers and IoT devices. However, it’s the first group that draws the most attention and scrutiny. Due to the graphic nature of desktop applications, users are often more attuned to potential problems and issues that may arise in the desktop space than with command-line tools or software running in

Why LZO was chosen as the new compression method

Everyone wants fast applications. Recently, we provided a mechanism to make snap applications launch faster by using the LZO format. We introduced this change because users reported desktop snaps starting more slowly than the same applications distributed via traditional, native Linux packaging formats like Deb or RPM. After a thorough in

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,

Snap speed improvements with new compression algorithm!

Security and performance are often mutually exclusive concepts. A great user experience is one that manages to blend the two in a way that does not compromise on robust, solid foundations of security on one hand, and a fast, responsive software interaction on the other. Snaps are self-contained applications, with layered security, and as