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As someone who submitted a patch a few years back to fix a gimp startup problem, I don't think they really care.

The visual purity of seeing all those plugins loading, and having it take a long time seems to be part of the mystique they are looking for. If it just started right up, it wouldn't send the same message.

According to the article it’s the opposite: it gets slower as you add cores. I wonder if it’s better to launch it with `taskset -c 0-3` or similar.

I think that's consistent with it being singlethreaded. AIUI, unless you pin the process to a single core, scheduling can make it bounce around between cores, and the probability you'll land on a different core (and, thus, incur more cache sync issues) goes up with the number of cores.

GIMP decides to optimize the plugins for each individual core in the system, so the complexity of startup increases with the number of cores present. It's a single threaded process, so more cores = takes longer. At least for the first startup when that happens anyway.

They added lazy loading of fonts a couple years back, which took a chunk out of startup time.