Comment 22 for bug 290666

Emilio, I do see quite an improvement as 1.6 is something in the ballpark of 40% faster for me. Ext4/fdatasync(?) help too as the rest of the system stays fairly responsive.

Unfortunately it still means counting startup and feed update times in minutes on my setup. Have a look at the time stamps of the attachment. The main window showed up roughly 2min in and then it stayed mostly grey (compiz) for another 16min until all feeds where updated and drive activity went down. Add 20s for my reaction time to close it and the total is

real 18m53.812s
user 0m0.952s
sys 0m1.104s
1344 fdatasyncs
~39MiB written to the drive (/proc/diskstat)

With the patch and LIFEREA_SYNCHRONOUS=0:

real 0m37.556s
user 0m0.704s
sys 0m0.772s
0 fdatasyncs, a handful of fsyncs
~1.49 MiB written to the drive (/proc/diskstat)

This is with a fresh profile, all the default feeds and 270 new messages.
And again, this drive is slow, particularly for random-like I/O. I'm sure the majority of disks does better.

This is what I did:
rm -rf .liferea_1.4 .liferea_1.6
a) unset LIFEREA_SYNCHRONOUS
b) export LIFEREA_SYNCHRONOUS=0
sync
time strace -e fsync,fdatasync -Ff -tT liferea 2>&1 | tee /tmp/strace_liferea_1.6.0~rc6-1ubuntu1.txt

Where "/tmp" is a ram disk to take logging out of the picture.