Launch speed on Linux

Long-term user here (since March 2018, judging from my oldest notes:). Love Joplin; I've been playing with Notion as well, which we use as a team-wiki, but I am not satisfied with the speed of navigation between things there, and the ability to run offline (plus, prefer FOSS and self-hosted). So still, Joplin it is, even without databases and kanban and the handy slash commands.

The main thing that keeps bothering me is the launch speed on Linux. I have a travel laptop (Surface Go), which is pretty slow, but still ok for what I do (devops things + typescript/react development). To fire up Joplin, it takes about 8-10 seconds till the electron window appears (white), and another 8-10 seconds for the content to be rendered. That's ~20 seconds in total. Cold and repeated start take about the same time (I measured about two seconds faster on second start -> 18s to start working with my notes).

I tried the .deb version of Joplin that someone is packaging on Releases · LFdev / Joplin Desktop Linux package · GitLab. It required some fiddling, as I'm running the pre-release, so, new user, import my joplin data. It takes only about 4s for the window to appear, and then another 4s to finish rendering and become interactive.

That makes me move to this .deb packaged version. Is there a way to speed up the appimage version? And, wouldn't it be nice if we made joplin repos available, maybe through https://build.opensuse.org/?

A note: Why would I want to keep closing and opening Joplin:

  • the cpu usage is significant when the "synchronizing" icon is spinning; leading to decrease of battery life
  • ram consumption (this machine only has 8GB)

I also wasn't able to get the cli version of joplin to sync with self-hosted joplin server - but didn't dig much here.

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It sounds like your bottleneck is on decompressing the AppImage everytime it runs, either due to the CPU being unable to keep up with the IO/hard drive, or the IO itself being slow.

A good experiment would be to extract the AppImage (Running AppImages — AppImage documentation) and try the Joplin executable directly, so that it's already unpacked on the system the same way the .deb is. If it launches quicker extracted, then the performance overhead is likely the compression on the AppImage.

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