[Qgis-developer] Processing causes major slowness at QGIS startup

[Luca Manganelli]

Hi,

in our organization with over 1,000 windows machines, we install QGIS
on a windows samba share so it can be launched via a desktop shortcut.

We discovered that the processing python plugin is the slowest plugin
to load. The QGIS base install contains 5 python plugins (fTools,
metaSearch, gdalTools, db_manager and processing) and we calculated on
a windows 7 pc these times:

QGIS with processing plugin
time from "loading python plugins" to GUI screen -> 31 seconds (to
load all 5 plugins)

QGIS without processing plugin
time from "loading python plugins" to GUI screen -> 15 seconds (over 50% gain)

Investigating the processing plugin, it seems that it loads all the
configs in the init() code, not in the initGUI() as should be
correctly.

Note that this slowness will be visible for everyone that has this
plugin DISABLED in the plugin list, because the initialization code is
in init(), so this slowness is involving all.