[dash] The dash takes 25 seconds to show up when invoked

Thanks for the report Mariano.

If I understand correctly the issue you are facing, the first time you try to open the places (aka dash) it takes a long time to load and the other parts of the UI become unresponsive. Is that correct?

Please note that the startup of unity-2d-places is intentionally delayed by 10 seconds in order not to impact startup time.

I can confirm this with the latest from ppa. When clicking the apps place (or any place) we are supposed to start the place and display it. This not working correctly anymore. There is a very long delay after clicking until the place is shown - like 10-20 seconds. It's reproducible each time after login.

I see 2 problems:
1) places are not autostarting after 10 seconds - they are never autostarted
2) clicking place from launcher results in major delay until visible ui

attaching .xsessions-error

also confirming as marian reports that the rest of the ui (i.e. indicators, etc,) are blocked while waiting for place to appear

Unity-2d got an update today (Using daily PPA)
The bug is still there, but now the icons on the launcher don't move.. Can't drag icons inside the launcher. 'killall unity-2d-launcher' doesn't change anything.

I wanted to let you guys know before I submit another bug report... ?

Cheers,

-Mariano

@Mariano: that’s definitely a different issue, please file a separate bug report and we’ll look into it. Thanks!

I can reproduce, and it’s actually quite bad: in my VM, the dash takes more than 20 seconds to appear after a place entry is clicked in the launcher. During all this time, no message is issued to .xsession-errors. The only message that is potentially related to the issue is printed just when the dash finally appears:

unity-2d-launcher: [WARNING] void PlaceEntry::connectToDash(): Fetching Dash.active property failed

So it looks like when clicking a place entry in the launcher, or when clicking the ubuntu button in the panel, the executable for the dash (/usr/bin/unity-2d-places) is started instantly, yet in both cases the actual dash takes ~25 seconds to appear on screen.

However if unity-2d-places is previously started from a terminal, invoking the dash shows it almost immediatly. It looks like the issue is with the D-Bus interface of the dash: the issue can be reproduced by making sure unity-2d-places in not running and invoking the following command:

    qdbus com.canonical.Unity2d.Dash /Dash com.canonical.Unity2d.Dash.activateHome

The revision number that introduced this regression is 458 ([dash] Keep the Launcher visible when the Dash appears).

The blocking call is the instantiation of the D-Bus interface in LauncherClientPrivate::init():

    m_iface = new QDBusInterface(LAUNCHER_DBUS_SERVICE,
                                 LAUNCHER_DBUS_OBJECT_PATH,
                                 LAUNCHER_DBUS_INTERFACE,
                                 QDBusConnection::sessionBus(), q);

It looks like we are hitting http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-14485.
A possible solution is to use QDBusConnection::asyncCall (http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qdbusconnection.html#asyncCall) instead of building a QDBusInterface.