Tiny Core Linux for Embedded RPi GUI Application

[jars121]

G'day everyone,

I've been developing a PySide GUI application for an embedded project I've been working on, and am at the point of prototyping the various hardware options. I've got an RPi2 laying around, on which I've installed the latest version of Raspbian Jessie for testing purposes. My application runs, but very slowly (elements are supposed to refresh at ~60Hz, and I'm currently only seeing 3-4Hz), but before looking at alternative SBCs or embedded computers, or spending countless hours optimising the Jessie installation, I wanted to look at some lighter-weight Linux distributions.

Would Tiny Core offer significant performance improvements, in terms of GPU and CPU, over Jessie? Another significant element in my design is the boot time; what can I reasonably expect to see in terms of time from powering on to booting directly into an application?

I've got plenty of reading yet to do on this distribution, but wanted to start the ball rolling and hopefully hear from more experienced users that have pondered similar questions already.

Cheers,

Jamie

[curaga]

A lighter distro would boot quicker, use less RAM and have less things running in the background, as well as take less space on the SD card.

However, your app's slowness doesn't appear to be due to these. It's at such magnitude that you're doing something wrong or unoptimized. Similar results could happen by trying to use 3d (opengl) without a graphics card, using software rendering.

[andyj]

Could be your display hardware too. I have a Tcl/Tk app which runs fine using a GPIO TFT display, but the same size display over USB is kinda laggy. Obviously HDMI is the quickest. I don't know anything about the language you chose or what backends you are using if any. Have you tried profiling. Like Curaga said, changing distros probably won't make much difference.

[jars121]

Thanks for the replies thus far, it's greatly appreciated

A bit of an update; I managed to get the software running last night at almost the full 'speed', with the various GUI elements updating at 80-90% of the required refresh rate.

The Jessie OS has a plethora of background processes running it seems (when I Ctrl Alt Del), so I think there are some gains to be made there. I no doubt will need to work on optimising my code as well, but removing as much overhead out of the OS will likely be my first step.

I'm very keen to give Tiny Core a go, so might pick up a second microSD card for that purpose.