Hey everyone,
this is a quick update on the 2.36 point releases. We decided to postpone 2.37 a little bit to release some performance improvements on top of 2.36.
The recently released 2.36.2 release contains an important fix to speed up application startup for apps that use fontconfig. Snapd will now automatically ensure the fontconfig caches are generated during install. In the past some apps would have to generate these caches on startup which lead to very noticeable slowdown. This is now fixed.
The upcoming 2.36.3 release will also include another performance related improvement. It is now possible to use snap run --trace-exec to see what helpers are launched and how long they run. This can be useful when debugging why a app startup is slow. Here is an example:
$ snap run --trace-exec test-snapd-tools.echo hello
hello
Slowest 3 exec calls during snap run:
0.010s snap-update-ns
0.177s /snap/core/6135/usr/lib/snapd/snap-confine
0.086s /usr/lib/snapd/snap-exec
Total time: 0.270s
Beside this 2.36.3 contains some more highlights:
- enable SELinux support on CentOS 7
- httputil: retry on temporary net errors (like DNS errors)
- fixes for UC18
We hope you enjoy the release of 2.36.2 and the upcoming 2.36.3